©Beowulf Sheehan
Books by Anne Carson
Anne Carson is a Canadian writer and classicist who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” She has been a cult figure in North American literary circles for many years – her 1986 book-length essay, Eros the Bittersweet, being considered essential reading among poets and critics – but has grown significantly in international fame and reputation over recent years.
If you are new to Anne Carson’s work, you may wish to begin with her best-known books. The Beauty of the Husband (2001), her T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection that charts the demise of a marriage “in 29 tangos,” is accessible, intriguing and deeply moving. Autobiography of Red (1998), is a strange hybrid of ancient myth and contemporary fable which follows the story of a young, queer winged monster infatuated with a golden boy. And her 2002 translation Sappho’s poetry If Not, Winter – presented in parallel with the original Greek – brings together all the surviving fragments of the ancient writer’s work we have.
As well as the Nobel prize, Carson has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Macarthur ‘Genius Grant’ and twice the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Here, we’ve put together a collection of what we consider to be Carson’s most unmissable books, a partial list of publications from a long and very storied career. We also think you may enjoy this recording of her reading from ‘Cassandra Float Can’ and her polyphonic sonnet sequence ‘Lecture on Pronouns’ at the 92nd Street Poetry Center in 2008.
Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay
by Anne Carson
In this 1986 essay adapted from her doctoral thesis, the Classicist Anne Carson considers the complex nature of eros – romantic love – in all its maddening, miserable, ecstatic glory. Writing in the Observer, Erica Wagner declared it is "a cult classic with good reason"; "the kind of book that just blows the doors off your mind."
“I think Anne Carson is one of the most startling original contemporary voices in poetry and if you’ve ever heard her read it is the most extraordinary experience. I love The Beauty of the Husband. It’s very unconventional as a poetry collection because it’s actually a novel. She’s devised her own idiosyncratic structuring principle, which is the tango – the dance. She tells the story of a divorce in what she calls 29 tangos. It’s utterly compelling: every time I read it I can’t put it down. She’s got that novelist’s knack of making you turn the page and at the same time there is such radiant poetic language. I think it’s a brilliant book.” Read more...
Sinéad Morrissey, Poet
“I discovered Anne Carson about ten years ago, and was alone and desperately trying to get people to read her. And then suddenly she seems to have had this explosion. ‘The Glass Essay’ is an amazing piece of writing about the relationship between a mother and daughter. It’s a hugely complex relationship. It’s also an amazing book about dementia and about caring for a father. It’s probably the most interesting thing I’ve ever read about Emily Brontë. There’s a library full of stuff about Brontë, but that thing in Carson’s poem – ‘She knows how to hang puppies, that Emily’ – makes it the most insightful and empathetic borrowing of Emily Brontë’s energies. It’s phenomenal. Anne Carson teaches you is that you can always be clever enough, you can always work harder, you can always train yourself to understand more.” Read more...
Max Porter on the Books That Shaped Him
Max Porter, Novelist
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
In Anne Carson's 1998 novel-in-verse, we meet Geryon – a winged red monster, wrestling with the aftermath of an unhappy and obsessive love affair. In a New York Times review on first publication, the poet Ruth Padel explains: "Anne Carson has created, from fragments of the Greek poet Stesichorus, a profound love story – a reverie on the mystery of one person's power over another." It is, she continues, "sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted." Autobiography of Red became something of a cult hit, its popularity only growing as the years went by. A follow-up, Red Doc>, was published in 2013.
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."
“Essentially, it’s a box. Inside the box is a connected, folded concertina of pages. On one side of the page—the verso—she often gives a dictionary definition for the 63 words of Catullus’s poem, which is supposedly an elegy for his brother. So, it’s like a dictionary gloss, but it’s an imitation, to an extent, because she keeps on giving definitions that include the idea of ‘nox’, of night. On the other side of the page, we get an account—appropriately enough, for a meditation on Catullus’s poem—of her own brother’s death. She pieces together fragments of his life. The reader has to piece together the fragmented narrative, and some of the pages are formatted like photocopied, torn pages—the scattered leaves of a life. It’s like a memorial album, written in prose.” Read more...
The Best Recent Poetry to Read
Jamie McKendrick, Literary Scholar
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
by Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
“It is so ancient that all that remains are a collection of fragments of lyric poetry which were composed to be sung to the lyre. I think there’s actually only one complete poem in there, Ode to Aphrodite, but the fragments in themselves are just beautiful – reflections on everything from marriage to old age, bees and chickpeas. It covers a lot of ground. I find it an absolute feast. It appeals to our senses and is so evocative. Even when you’ve got a fragment – some are barely even fragments, they’re tiny shards, just a word or two – they are full of bare feet and tongues and desire and gold and all these things which just make your senses go crazy. They make mine go crazy. You’ve got all this sun and salt and sweat in the Aegean Sea and brides and bridegrooms and blossom of nectar and flowers and colours. I just think it’s extraordinary.” Read more...
Interviews where books by Anne Carson were recommended
The best books on Synaesthesia, recommended by Lydia Ruffles
How does someone with synaesthesia see the world? How does it contribute to creativity and expression? Author Lydia Ruffles recommends books and suggests an intriguing list of artists who may have been synaesthetes.
The best books on Divine Women, recommended by Bettany Hughes
Ancient history was a man’s world – but women were considered closer to the gods. The historian and TV presenter Bettany Hughes reveals the secrets of Athenian priestesses, Byzantine empresses and Stone Age fertility goddesses.
The Best Recent Poetry to Read, recommended by Jamie McKendrick
Looking for recent collections of poetry to read this year? Longtime Faber poet and virtuosic translator Jamie McKendrick recommends the five best poetry books he’s read in the last year, from a peculiar book of grief by Anne Carson to a long-awaited volume by Michael Hofmann.
Max Porter on the Books That Shaped Him
Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, on the books that have taken him from childhood to adulthood, the deepening shadow of nuclear war, and why he’ll always be on his knees in front of Emily Dickinson
The best books on Poetry, recommended by Sinéad Morrissey
The award-winning Northern Irish poet reveals why the inimitable Sylvia Plath is not always a good influence on young poets and why sublimation of the self is sometimes better than self-expression
