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Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist
The scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. The first monographic study of her work to date, Anne The Glass Essayist makes the case for the acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator as a remarkable experimental scholar and reader, who rehearses scholarly methods while slipping their constraints of form and emotion. Carson's attention to sources-ancient and modern, textual or visual-is one of few constants across almost four decades of her published writing, whose uncertain claims on discipline and genre are claimed here as a certain interpretive style.
The book follows Carson's readings through variations in form-from early academic prose and poem-essays to creative adaptations and works for performance-to come to grips with what Coles calls Carson's not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, process, and intent. Carson's portraits of working perform to readers even where she fantasizes her own erasure; where chance, poetic economy, impersonation, and imitation ride the line of anonymity. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and post-critical form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now .
The book follows Carson's readings through variations in form-from early academic prose and poem-essays to creative adaptations and works for performance-to come to grips with what Coles calls Carson's not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, process, and intent. Carson's portraits of working perform to readers even where she fantasizes her own erasure; where chance, poetic economy, impersonation, and imitation ride the line of anonymity. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and post-critical form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now .
344 pages, Hardcover
Published September 8, 2023
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 13, 2025
I enjoyed it until the last two chapters + postscript, which I felt was exhausting and beginning to sound repetitive. I wish Coles can talk more about autobiography of red and red doc>. The translation part really thrww me off when Coles started to talk about Lu Ji's poetics, which I couldn't find the original passage in Chinese even though I know the article Carson could have found it. I also just hate the Ezra Pound chapter because he is the sewage system of English literature, drenched in shits and pees thinking it smells like a Japanese garden, constantly pegging the anus of poetry
Displaying 1 of 1 review