Red Doc>

by Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s beloved winged monster returns in this strange and beautiful work of poetry, prose and drama. “Where to start?” wrote Sarah Crown in her Guardian review: “With her antic reworking of Greek mythology? Her exuberant intertextuality? Her formal experimentalism, which leaves swaths of contemporary poetry looking irremediably blah by comparison? That weird angle bracket in the title?” It is all of these things and more. Like Autobiography of Red, it reworks or reimagines the 10th Labour of Herakles, setting it in a fantasy of the present day. “To engage so fluidly, so originally and compellingly, with a story first told more than 3,000 years ago, is astonishing: her ambition is one thing; the fact that it is so completely achieved is, frankly, something else.”