Who is Anne Carson?
Total Known Facts Known About Geryon.
Geryon was a monster everything about him was red. Geryon lived
on an island in the Atlantic called the Red Place. Geryon’s mother
was a river that runs to the sea the Red Joy River Geryon's father
was gold. Some say Geryon had six hands six feet some say wings.
Geryon was red so were his strange red cattle. Herakles came one
day killed Geryon got the cattle.
He followed Facts with Questions and Answers.
QUESTIONS Why did Herakles kill Geryon?
l. Just violent.
2. Had to it was one of His Labors (10th).
3. Got the idea that Geryon was Death otherwise he could live forever
FINALLY
Geryon had a little red dog Herakles killed that too.
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red [1]
Intro
This chapter is part of my larger thesis work tracing how relation endures grief, rupture, and time. I share it because in the writing I found companionship — a sense that someone else, somewhere, was also trying to learn how language can hold what it cannot heal. And in the saftey of my studies I found that I was not alone.
These pages follow Anne Carson through fragments, returns, and questions that keep meaning open. The questions at the end of the chapter still move in me; yet they have steadied and nourished me through loss and the slow labor of tennding to my heart across the vastness of time. If you feel something stirring as you read, let it. That is the real conversation this writing hopes to keep alive — a quiet exchange between our different ways of carrying what hurts with tenderness and grace.
Academic Necessity
The thesis you are about to read argues that Anne Carson’s work shows how human relation is shaped by a hunger that cannot be satisfied or resolved — a desire for meaning, connection, and presence that emerges most sharply in the face of loss. At the center of this thesis is a question I have traced again and again through Carson’s work: how does relation survive grief, rupture, and time? Rather than closing this hunger through mastery or explanation, Carson keeps it open. Her literary practice of asking, carrying, and fragmenting becomes a way of tending to grief and memory without seeking to fix or contain them.
Within this writing, we will move through a series of meditations on grief, historiography, and theological refusal in Anne Carson’s work. Rather than analyzing each text in isolation, I trace how Carson’s thinking on relation, memory, and endurance emerges across a variety of her works. Through recurring images of carrying, asking, fragmenting, and tending, I explore how Carson models a practice of staying with hunger as a metaphysical posture oriented towards nourishing relation without seeking closure.
This work does not follow a traditional argumentative structure. Instead, it performs its claims through method, form, and metaphor. Evidence is present—but often in fragments, recursions, and associative resonance rather than through linear exposition. Through close readings of Nox, Autobiography of Red, Economy of the Unlost, Grief Lessons, Eros the Bittersweet, and Decreation, I aim to show how Carson works with delay, letting meaning ripen over time instead of forcing it into closure. Her attention to figures like Herodotus, Paul Celan, Marguerite Porete, and Joan of Arc reveals how relation is nourished by patience, care, and endurance — by refusing to settle grief into doctrine or seal absence into explanation.
At its heart, this project claims that relation depends on how we carry what cannot be mastered: how we wait with it, tend it, and allow it to remain alive in time. It suggests that grief is a metaphysical condition that resists containment and furthers that argument to say that memory is a kind of relational labor. Instead of telling, it asks us to consider that to make something beautiful and wounded and rigorous out of this is a form of philosophy, not in spite of its fragmentation, but because of it. Carson’s fragments and refusals are not about resisting meaning, but about keeping relation open by showing that hunger and delay are the conditions that nourish presence, memory, and care. It is, deeply, a call towards the artist as philosopher-poet.
In following Carson’s own poetics of delay and fragmentation, this thesis adopts a form that enacts its argument, allowing method to become a mode of philosophical inquiry. This project is therefore both an argument and the creation of an experience. Its recursive movement, delayed definitions, and fragmentary sectionals are enactments of the philosophy it attempts to teach. I follow Carson not only in what I read but in how I write, letting form bear the weight of content: asking, circling, and returning as modes of thought that resist premature resolution. In doing so, this thesis situates itself within a lineage of hybrid works where method is inseparable from claim and philosophy is grounded in poetry.
Such writing risks discomfort because it holds open the wound it studies. But this discomfort is generative: it insists that ideas unfold at the pace of relation, grief, and time themselves. In this sense, the form of this work is not ornamental but essential, modeling a way of thinking that lingers, doubles back, and attends, trusting that meaning ripens through duration rather than being extracted through force.
Synonyms of Survival
How does one give an account of another person, especially for someone you have never met? Anne Carson, born in 1950 in Toronto Canada is a person who is still alive, and yet, she is an invisible to me—she is someone I have never spoken to in speech, or in the physical reality of form. Still, I have spent countless hours over the past year and half pouring myself mutely into the landscape of her words. I have traced the spines they are encased in and tried to understand what these garments might imply in praxis if placed over the contents of my own body.
Would it be right for me to say that these words are a part of her history? She is a historian after all. Yet, to fix anything down that is still moving seems to be its own kind of little death. In her text Nox, Carson will tell us that “history and elegy are akin,”[2] so perhaps she might agree with me. To explain, she does what any historian trained in translation would, she begins with the etymology.
The word ‘history’ comes from an ancient Greek verb ἱστορεῖν, to ask. One who asks about things—about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell—is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself. [3]
Within this gesture, the act of carrying or fashioning becomes, for Carson, simultaneously a historical method, a practice of human endurance, and a means of continuance in the face of insurmountable loss. What begins in etymology ends in the discipline and responsibility encountered through life’s various folds. And this responsibility matters—it is material. Weight, location, smell. To be an historian, she suggests, is to realize the haughtiness of trying to stand above the event once you realize, suddenly, that you and everything else are still inside it. Enmeshed within it. That you are here because something else decayed to rot and gave birth to the doubt beneath your feet.
Her syntax traces the experience of this realization as it unfolds in time: “It is when you are asking about something,” she writes—not before, not after. The act of asking comes first. Only within that gesture—already reaching, already trying to hold what cannot be held—does the recognition arrive: you are alive. Not just that you lived through something, but that living has rendered you singular, separated, strange to yourself. That you are now the one left behind.
So the reflection turns inward: “you realize you yourself have survived it.” That repetition—you yourself—splits the self open so a doubling occurs. Not an identity intact, but an identity bending back on itself, made suddenly visible through the fact of its own survival. This is the sensation of being cast forward by grief and then catching sight of yourself from the outside, still breathing. The subject becomes recursive—exposed, continuous, wounded by persistence. You are alive, and something else is not. This is the wound speaking.
You now exist out of step with what once held you in meaning. The world that shaped you has ruptured, and yet you remain—unmoored, continuous, altered. You are not whole in your survival. You are remainder. And the pain comes from recognizing that your life is now defined by an absence of that relation. The “you” that speaks in this sentence carries a new grammar—one shaped by grief’s asymmetry.
So when she says, “you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself,” she is registering a condition that is already underway. The grief has breached containment. The asking has begun because there was nowhere else for the pain to go. This is inquiry as leakage. The question seeps. It emerges from the body's inability to metabolize what it has lost. And so, history begins as an overflow, transforming from a mere record into a vital, life-sustaining act, a means of preventing personal dissolution in the face of devastating absence.
Phoenix Egg
Likewise in Nox, Carson tells a story of Hekataios, “who lived in the city of Miletos in the generation before Herodotos and who cannot be called an ‘historian’ because Herodotos is regarded as the author of that role.”[4] The point is not that Hekataios lacks distance. He does not yet know that what he is doing will later be called history. He is still inside the act of inventing it.
Carson tells us he composed “a How To Go Around the Earth (with map) containing this (as I think of it) metaphor for his own activity.”[5] The passage that follows traces a sequence of movements shaped by each verb enacting the form of grief pressed into time—time woven through grief.
He makes out of myrrh an egg as big as he can carry. Then he tests it to see if he can carry it. After that he hollows out the egg and lays his father inside and plugs up the hollow... he carries the egg to Egypt to the temple of the sun.[6]
The task is meticulous. The egg is more than an abstract symbol of mourning—it is the container for the body of his dead. Hekataios writes as a way to embalm his father’s life, extend his time among the living—or perhaps only to seal him off from vanishing. What the egg preserves is unclear, yet in its ambiguity lies its generative purpose.
This is both an act of preservation and an act of ontological creation: a refusal to let the lost vanish completely, actively forging a new mode of being for the deceased within the world of the living. He builds a form to carry what remains—what memory cannot hold, what language has not yet shaped. Once sealed inside the egg, the ancestral body enters another state: no longer alive, not yet fully gone. This liminal state suggests an existence beyond received distinctions, a being that perhaps requires a new name. The egg, then, functions as a tangible, if mysterious, map for gestation—a creation on how to get around grieving, guiding navigation through a reality reshaped by loss.
Carson describes Hekataios as taking this metaphor from the description of a sacred phoenix which comes to Egypt once every 500 years to bury a father there. This bird, too, mourns through verbal acting– “shaping, weighing, testing, hollowing, plugging and carrying towards the light.”[7] These verbs enact a ritualized mourning shaped by the need to give memory a form that can move. Each gesture tends to the past by constructing a vessel that can bear it forward. It is not about fixing the dead in place, nor about freezing the living in loss. It is about building a container before the grief leaks out on its own.
The writing of history, then, becomes out of “a clear view of necessity,”[8] such that it is an attempt to translate grief into a language the body can carry forward—the bodily knowledge that something must be made, or it will undo you. What do we do with the remainder when confronted with the realization that we are alive, and yet that implies the inescapable sorrow of death?
She will tell us that “Autopsy is a term historians use of the ‘eyewitnessing’ of data or events by the historian himself, a mode of authorial power.”[9] But it is interesting to note that the ancestor of this tradition does not start off claiming such authorial states. For example, Herodotos also mentions this same story of the phoenix, though he doesn’t claim to be an eyewitness of such a bird or the bird’s father’s fate. Instead, “Herodotos likes to introduce such information with a word like λέγεται: ‘it is said.’”[10] This gesture matters. It acknowledges the story’s transmission without claiming dominion over it. In this sense, Herodotos practices a kind of restraint—he allows the myth to pass through him as information without requiring it to become a fixed fact.
The Art of Asking
Carson describes Herodotos as a writer who trains the reader through a sequence of verbs—“asking, searching, collecting, doubting, striving, testing, blaming, and above all standing amazed at the strange things humans do.”[11] These, too, are not epistemological in the strict sense. They do not accumulate toward knowledge. They accumulate toward motion. Toward staying with what cannot be solved. The final verb she gives is not to know, but to stand amazed at the strangeness of this asking, the accumulation of information through the necessity of our verbs.
Of this strangeness, Carson will point out that “by far the strangest thing that humans do - [Herodotos] is firm on this - is history… For it often produces no clear or helpful account, in fact, people are satisfied with the most bizarre forms of answering.”[12] She continues with another example from Herodotos, who, when asking the Skythians the size of their population received the answer by being pointed towards a bowl.
It is made of the melted down arrowheads required of each Skythian by their king Ariantes on pain of death. Herodotos describes the bowl, what else can he do?[13]
Carson’s question here is apt, as Herodotus is outside the grief that made it—he stands apart from the deep sorrow that likely inspired the creation of the bowl. Because of this emotional detachment, he can't truly perform "autopsy," or dissect the full significance of this artifact. Its meaning isn't quantifiable beyond what exists solely within the memory or monumental status the bowl embodies. This makes any "response" from the bowl or its creators seem strange to Herodotus, as its logic is one he can't inhabit or measure. Carson's insight that "History can be at once concrete and indecipherable" directly illuminates Herodotus's predicament. He can only articulate what he sees, leaving him to grapple with the unquantifiable depth that eludes his empirical methods.
Consequently, the bowl can only be viewed through the lens of formal response, made all the more striking by its unusual creation. Instead of being carved directly from raw material through extraction, it was melted down and reshaped. This process, much like Hekataios's meticulous fashioning of the egg from myrrh, suggests a different kind of mastery where the epistemic value lies in confronting the unquantifiable and liminal—whether the bizarre census of the Skythians or the liminality of the entombed dead—and responding with awe, suggesting a deep understanding of how to map or navigate the complexities of human experience and memory across the dense landscape of time.
Carson extends this exploration of narrative openness and resistance to closure in her essay Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, which examines the power of ambiguity and the silent gaps between speech. Among the stories she weaves is her reading of the 1431 trial of Joan of Arc, where the young French peasant girl stood accused of heresy. Her trial focused obsessively on the voices Joan claimed to hear—voices that guided her actions both militarily and morally. Her inquisitors repeatedly demanded that Joan describe these voices using “recognizable religious imagery and emotions, in a conventional narrative that would be susceptible to conventional disproof.”[14] Instead, in Carson’s telling of the story, Joan resisted, refusing to translate her experiences into what Carson calls “theological clichés,”[15] or pre-established, reductive religious frameworks, that her inquisitors sought.
Joan, however, steadfastly resisted these demands, refusing to offer the familiar religious iconography that could be easily categorized and dismissed. In Carson’s reading, Joan "despised the line of inquiry and blocked it as long as she could."[16] The voices, she insisted, had no easy narrative—they were a deeply felt reality, beyond articulate form. As Carson notes, “It seems that for her, the voices had no story. They were an experienced fact so large and real it had solidified in her as a sort of sensed abstraction.”[17] This suggests that, for Joan,her voices defied the narratives her inquisitors demanded—raw, visceral, embodied rather than reducible to definable forms.
By refusing to fit her experiences into these prescribed frameworks, Joan’s cryptic responses subverted the demand for straightforward, codified religious imagery. Her deliberate ambiguity, such as in her famous response, "The light comes in the name of the voice,"[18] actively challenged the expectations placed upon her, maintaining the mystery of her experience. By doing so, she preserves the complex position of agency and integrity held within her lived experience, ensuring that her relationship with the voices remains something internal and ungraspable, resisting reduction to simple explanations or theologies that would strip them of their true significance as they are felt embodied within her.
Carson finds in Joan’s defiance a broader critique of language’s limitations—what she calls a “rage against cliché”[19]—where Joan’s refusal to conform to theological and narrative clichés represents an act of resistance that preserves the complexity of her lived reality, ensuring that her experience remains untranslatable and unclaimed by received language. By opposing the reduction of her experiences to formulaic responses, Joan’s resistance becomes revolutionary in its denial to provide a clear, tangible image or narrative that could be easily dissected or dismissed. This act can be read as a form of “genius”[20] because it demonstrates Joan’s ability to strategically navigate the constraints of her situation, responding to the clichéd questions imposed on her not with compliance, but with disruption. Her insistence on using terms like "voice," "counsel," or "comfort" to describe how God guided her, rather than succumbing to the expected, reductive responses, exemplifies her resistance to being reduced to a simplistic narrative, thereby maintaining the integrity and complexity of her experience.
Carson positions the rage felt by Joan as something universally experienced—a reaction to the pressure of being asked to conform to reductive narratives. It is the rage felt when social reality fails to capture the full complexity of individual experience. This rage, as Carson suggests, is a response to the tension between personal truth and external expectations, something that resonates with everyone on some level. As Carson will tell us, "the genius answer to it is catastrophe."[21]
In this context, catastrophe represents a rupture in received understanding, a moment where easy answers collapse and deepen, allowing more complex meanings to ripple and emerge. She elaborates, "I say catastrophe is an answer because I believe cliché is a question. We resort to cliché because it's easier than trying to make up something new. Implicit in it is the question, Don't we already know what we think about this? Don't we have a formula we use for this?"[22] Carson’s implication then seems to be that by resisting these expectations, Joan not only preserves the integrity of her personal experience but also disrupts the formulaic thinking that clichés represent, forcing a reconsideration of how such experiences are perceived.
As Joan navigated her trial, she carefully chose her words, leaving much unsaid, allowing the gaps in her testimony to speak as loudly as her words. This strategic ambiguity gave her a measure of control, letting her experiences remain just beyond the reach of her inquisitors’ understanding. There is a certain power in what is left incomplete—in the space where meaning is hinted at but never fully revealed. It is in these spaces of silence that deeper truths often reside, waiting to be uncovered by those willing to look beyond the obvious.
I think about this myself deeply, as I try to consider how to give you facts about Anne Carson when my subjective experience is that she is a writer who trains you as you read. Joan was eventually burned for her refusal, and though there are more theologically accurate ways to read her story, I agree with Carson that she was right to rage. The original violence started long before they put her in the cage.
Facts about Anne Carson
And so, if one were to ask who Anne Carson is, the natural impulse might be to begin with the facts. One might say:
Anne Patricia Carson (born June 21, 1950) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. Trained at the University of Toronto, Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton.[23]
Though you might be more interested to know that Carson published Autobiography of Red in 1998 and two years later was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. Autobiography was mentioned alongside Carson’s other most well-known book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), in a 2004 episode of The L Word, cementing both as queer classics in the public eye. In Eros, Carson meditates on desire through the fragments of Sappho, tracing how longing is structured by absence and the triangular geometry of eros—lover, beloved, and the gap between. This early study of Sappho’s eros finds echoes in both her translation of If Not, Winter (2002) and in Autobiography of Red, where love’s intensity is bound up with distance and perception.
Autobiography of Red in particular reimagines the tenth labor of Herakles—his slaying of the red-winged monster Geryon—by retelling it through Geryon’s eyes. Carson draws on fragments from Stesichoros, the ancient poet who first rewrote this myth from Geryon’s perspective, and transforms them into a modern queer bildungsroman. Framed as a verse novel, it merges classical myth with contemporary intimacy: Geryon’s monstrousness becomes a metaphor for queer otherness, while his love for Herakles unfolds in moments of heat, distance, and sharp perception that echo the philosophy she presents in Eros the Bittersweet. By fusing Stesichoros’s mythic inversion with her own lyric experimentation, Carson creates a text that is at once epic and tender, cementing Autobiography as both a queer classic and a work that reanimates the ancient world for modern desires.
However, if asked, I am more likely to tell you the story of how Carson had a brother who “ran away in 1978, rather than go to jail. He wandered in Europe and India, seeking something, and sent [Carson and her mother] postcards or a Christmas gift, no return address. He was traveling on a false passport and living under other people’s names. This isn’t hard to arrange.”[24] Carson will call this act “irremediable,” which sounds to me like a word laced in affect at the individual for long term relational harm.
Her brother “dies in the year 2000 / a surprise to [her].”[25] When Anne goes to Copenhagen her brother’s widow gives her “some old diaries she found. From his wandering years, filled with photographs that he developed himself in hotel rooms.”[26] This is interesting because photographs are a primary motif within Autobiography, even though her brother’s photographs and diary isn’t found until two years after the book’s publication time.
This strikes me as strange, but as I have no further tools to continue such an autopsy I could only continue with description. Carson subtitles Autobiography of Red, A Novel-in-Verse, signaling not just its hybrid form but also its deliberate engagement with the lyrical and fragmented nature of poetry. This structure allows her to explore themes in a way that prose alone might not capture, embracing the open-endedness and suggestive power of poetic expression. Her work as a translator, particularly her engagement with the remnants of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, has significantly shaped her understanding of these incomplete pieces as bridges between different worlds. When dealing with broken material, a translator must navigate the gaps, piecing together meaning from what remains while acknowledging what is missing. The spaces left by these breaks create a tension, requiring the translator to make interpretive choices that shape the reader’s experience.
During an interview for the Paris Review in 2004, Carson expressed her fascination with this process as “the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you.”[27] These absences can amplify the suggestive power of the script, as the reader is invited to imagine the possibilities that the missing parts evoke. This process encourages an interaction where meaning is continually negotiated, rather than conclusively determined, allowing the text to resist closure and retain a sense of mystery and multiplicity.
Carson published my favorite of her essays, Economy of the Unlost, in 1999. The piece unfolds as a comparative analysis of Simonides of Keos and Paul Celan, exploring how their unique "economies" of language not only engage with forms of negation to confront grief, but also subtly interrogate the existential and ethical dilemmas posed by a commodified world.
Within its pages, these poets are seen to fashion methods that challenge the dehumanizing aspects of material exchange, implicitly questioning dominant economic paradigms by reasserting the value of enduring connection over transient profit.
Carson suggests that this poetic economy offers a counter-model to commodified value. Through acts of form-making, the poet salvages something of what has been lost. But the exchange is not one-sided: the lost are also preserved, carried forward within the shape of the poem itself. What emerges is a fragile but vital bond—a shared persistence against oblivion, and a redefinition of what it means to remain human in a world that would rather forget.
This of course brings us back to Nox. Serving as a book-length epitaph for her brother, the text is a photographic facsimile of a handmade notebook Anne Carson created to process Michael’s death and the long absence that preceded it. The object takes the form of an accordion-folded codex, a structure that allows for a fragmentary style that powerfully juxtaposes Michael’s own photos and writings with Carson’s meditations, all revolving around her translation of Catullus’s Poem 101 which traces the death of his own brother and loss.
Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed --
I arrive at these poor, brother, burials
so I could give you the last gift owed to death
and talk (why?) with mute ash.
Now that Fortune tore you from me, you
oh poor (wrongly) brother (wrongly) taken from me,
now still anyway this -- what a distant mood of parents
handed down as the sad gift for burials --
accept! Soaked with tears of a brother
and into forever, brother, farewell and farewell.
-- Catullus 101 (translated by Anne Carson)[28]
Carson doesn’t make it to Copenhagen until two weeks past her brother’s funeral, but his widow still graciously takes her to the church where the funeral took place, Sankt Johannes. Here, she reflects that
It is white and clean as an eggshell inside. I like cleanliness.[29]
…
What comes to me now, as I kneel in a church in Copenhagen listening to long Danish gospels and letting the sheets of memory blow on the line, is that both my parents were laid out in their coffins (years apart, accidentally) in bright yellow sweaters. They looked like beautiful peaceful egg yolks.[30]
This convergence—eggshell walls, yolk-colored sweaters, the kneeling body—forms a spatial triangulation of ritual containment. The church interior becomes the outer shell: a sterile vessel constructed for the performance of mourning. Her own body, kneeling within that space, functions as the ritual hinge—neither wholly within nor outside the memory it summons. And the recollection of her parents’ bright yellow sweaters appears not as a decorative metaphor, but as the exposed interior: soft, luminous, and preserved. The arrangement echoes the grief making form attributed earlier to Hekataios. In both instances, the egg functions as a vessel for the unquantifiable—a profound act of "carrying" that both acknowledges loss and reasserts a vital connection, salvaging something of what has been lost through the act of its imaginative shaping.
This strange act of "carrying" and imaginative shaping, so vividly illustrated by Carson's own experience of grief, speaks to her broader fascination with fragments and the refusal of reductive explanation. Across her varied works, Carson consistently demonstrates how the ungraspable finds its most potent form not through definitive answers, but through a deliberate embrace of ambiguity through the formal use of poetry.
Yizkor and the Ethics of Memory
This radical act of refusal to be reduced is one Carson meticulously traces across various historical contexts. Her methodology of gathering disparate figures and moments into comparative studies thus seems to become a means of carrying the unquantifiable human experience in her own vessel of grief tending across time. Through these carefully constructed assemblages, Carson illuminates how humans in history grapple with loss and the systemic forces that seek to reduce, commodify, or silence genuine suffering. Her comparisons are formal interventions, designed, it seems, to salvage authentic substance from the reductive pull of cliché through the art of history.
For example, I am always moved by a similar resonance of this rage in the stories of the personal struggles she shares of Paul Celan in Economy of the Unlost.
He [Celan] lived in exile in Paris most of his life and wrote poetry in German, which was the language of his mother but also the language of those who had murdered his mother. Born in a region of Romania that survived Soviet, then German, occupation, he moved to France in 1948 and lived there till his death.[31]
Within the essay, Carson will detail Celan’s fraught encounters with established intellectuals, Martin Buber (1960) and Martin Heidegger (1967). He is said to have embarked towards these as a kind of pilgrimage, seeking to carry his unassimilable grief and urgent questions concerning his identity as a German-born Jew in the aftermath of the Holocaust. He desperately sought a responsive word, a true acknowledgement for his unbearable experience of survival. Yet, what Carson frames as potential "occasions of hospitality" instead became crucial and tragically disappointing moments.
Celan arrived "hungry for answers to some pertinent political questions"[32] and with a desperate expectation of genuine connection. His inscription in Heidegger’s guestbook, "Into the hutbook, looking at the wellstar, with a hope for a coming word in the heart," powerfully underscored his deep yearning for intellectual and moral reciprocation. Yet, these hopes collided with what Carson identifies as the "danger-free privilege of silence"[33] sanctioned evasions.
Heidegger's mere "letter of conventional thanks"[34] exemplifies the formulaic thinking Carson critiques—a perfunctory reply that evaded Celan’s deep political and existential inquiries. This dismissal reduced a desperate reach for connection to a social formality, violating the any supposed contract of meaningful intellectual hospitality. The consequence was a stark "delay" between Celan's urgent desire and that longed-for "coming word,"[35] a void so significant that Celan later excised "undelayed" from his poem Todtnauberg—“a hope today of a thinking man’s (undelayed coming) word in the heart.”[36]
Celan's meeting with Martin Buber shows a similar pain. He "actually kneeled for a blessing,"[37] with a "vital need," as Carson describes it, "to hear some echo of his plight"[38] as a German-speaking Jew indelibly affected by the Holocaust’s catastrophe. Buber's generalized assertion—"it was natural to publish there and taking a pardoning stance toward Germany"[39]—was precisely not the echo Celan desperately sought. Instead, it exemplified the "covering over" that Carson suggests cliché enables: smoothing over uncomfortable truths with unchallenging narratives that prioritize superficial peace over dealing with the reality of raw, ongoing suffering.
It was in the aftermath of such encounters that Celan penned the poem Die Schleuse (The Sluice), a powerful testament to his rage against such covering over:
Die Schleuse
Uber aller dieser deiner ¨
Trauer: kein
zweiter Himmel.
.......
An einen Mund,
dem es ein Tausendwort war,
verlor—
verlor ich ein Wort,
das mir verblieben war:
Schwester.
An die Vielg¨otterei
verlor ich ein Wort, das mich suchte:
Kaddisch.
Durch
die Schleuse mußt ich,
das Wort in die Salzflut zur¨uck—
und hinaus—und hin¨uberzuretten:
Jiskor.
[The Sluice
Over all this grief
of yours: no
second heaven.
.......
To a mouth,
for which it was a thousandword,
lost—
I lost a word,
that had remained to me:
sister.
To
manygoddedness
I lost a word that was looking for me:
Kaddish.
Through
the sluice I had to go,
to salvage the word into the saltflood back
and out and across:
Yizkor.] [40]
Carson explains Celan’s poem as one which speaks of "two words lost, one saved." First, he loses sister—the intimate, embodied site of relational belonging. Then he loses Kaddish—the ritual word that once positioned grief inside a sanctioned architecture of faith, allowing suffering to be borne as an affirmation of G-d’s justice. It's "recited as an affirmation of faith in God’s judgment, in the face of death, after the manner of Job, who cried out, 'Though He slay me yet will I trust him' (Job 13:15)."[41] For Celan, this "word of trust and praise is lost" because, though used for commemorative purpose, it is "not essentially a word of memory but rather a word that covers over the memory of human loss with praise of God’s glory."[42] In the face of the Holocaust, such affirmation becomes intolerable; to recite Kaddish would be to smooth over the rupture, to enfold the unspeakable into a system that demands praise precisely where praise can no longer be honestly given.
What remains, salvaged through the “sluice” of grief, is Yizkor—a special memorial prayer for the departed, recited in the synagogue only four times a year (on Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, the last day of Passover, and the second day of Shavuot). Its name literally means “May G-d remember.” Unlike Kaddish, which transforms grief into an affirmation of praise, Yizkor holds grief open as memory, invoking Hashem not to be glorified but in a plea of remembrance—preserving loss without explanation or repair. It allows our wounds to remain present without explanation, establishing a relation to God no longer built upon certainty or doctrinal coherence, but through a shared acknowledgment of what cannot be repaired or fully understood.
Through her stories of Celan then, Carson offers us a philosophy on identity in which the Self endures not by securing answers but by standing inside this fragile space of mutual remembering—a space where both God and human remain turned toward what resists closure. In this way, Celan’s refusal echoes Joan’s rage. Both Joan and Celan defend a form of relation that accepts slippage as part of its very structure—a relation that does not demand fixed forms of explanation, but remains alive precisely in its refusal to smooth over the fractures that their experiences have opened, thus safeguarding the raw, uncontainable truth of their individual realities from the assimilating logic of understanding.
Remembering makes absence present, opening the possibility of connection across time through loss. However, because this activity is unstable, it provokes a strong desire for something solid—something that can relieve the strain of remaining exposed to what cannot be resolved. The moment memory enters language, that fragile movement risks becoming frozen—a fixed object detached from its original rupture and made available for repetition and circulation.
This precariousness is precisely what Carson distills when she says: "Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory, to think it. Once void is thought, it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought, it can be commodified."[43] For Carson, the very act of "thinking"—of attempting to bring the fluid, intertwined reality of memory and void into conscious apprehension or linguistic form—is inherently an act of reduction. To define the boundless void, or to fix the elusive nature of memory, inevitably constrains them.
Once void is thus reduced and formalized in thought, its terrifying expanse can be cancelled, or domesticated. This process of reduction creates a remainder: that which is excluded, severed, or stripped away from the original, ungraspable totality. The catastrophe occurred, there has been a loss. Why did I survive?
This question, by necessity, turns inward with a particular ferocity for the survivor. For Carson, to remember "draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward," indicating a temporal relation that bends back on itself, made suddenly visible through the question of persistence. This is the sensation of being cast forward by grief and then catching sight of oneself from the outside, still breathing. The subject becomes recursive—exposed, vulnerable, wounded by the paradox of its own fractured continuity. You are alive, and something else is not. This is the wound speaking. You are remainder.
This remainder-state, an uncontained wound, inevitably produces slippage, which returns us to the imagery of the egg. The pain, the unassimilated experience, seeps out, demanding a form, a vessel to carry it forward. Thus, the temptation to stabilize loss into shared forms—whether religious, social, or commercial—is strong, because it promises safety from the ongoing discomforts of grief and death.
Ritual Relations
When Carson’s brother dies she goes on a pilgrimage to see his widow, who takes her to a church. There, she reflects on the whiteness of the church, noting that she “likes cleanliness.” The church, with its white eggshell purity, offers itself as a surrogate parent, a structure that promises to stabilize grief within sanctioned forms of consolation. The offering of order, for cleanliness, for theological coherence, emerges as a kind of parental gesture—a way to discipline the remainder into forms that can be managed.
So even as Carson kneels inside this pristine shell, memory ruptures the illusion. The image of her parents in bright yellow sweaters—“beautiful peaceful egg yolks”—surges forward, refusing to settle down. To lose a brother is to fracture the sibling bond, but it is also to stand exposed
before the parental frame—the God frame—which grief threatens to unmake. The yolk is soft, exposed, alive. It exposes the hollow promise of the shell’s smooth containment: grief remains, vivid and unruly, unwilling to be married into the order that would neutralize its singular claim.
This is where Carson’s grief brushes against the theological critique latent in my prowlings of her philosophy. The impulse to fashion grief into a clean vessel—to seal the dead inside an egg, to fold the lost into ritual praise, to domesticate pain into theological narrative—is the same impulse that drives the commodification of memory.
The ethical question, then, is not merely whether grief can be spoken, but who has the right to house it. Does grief belong to the mourner, or to the structures that would contain and repurpose it? The sibling’s disappearance, the parent’s death, the God who remains silent—these all converge into a crisis of containment. Carson’s work labors to keep grief from being subjugated in this way. Yizkor remains, in Celan’s word, as a fragile alternative: not a praise, but a remembrance—a mourning rite recited those loved and lost, invoked here as a form that demands G-d stay with us in the loss without attempting to transmute our pain into theological compliance.
This refusal—whether by ritual, by theology, or by the cleanliness of orthodoxy—threads back through Carson’s entire writing of history. History, for her, is both a parcel gilt cathedral in which the dead may rest and a leaking vessel, perpetually struggling to hold our grief at what once was but is now missing. To fashion memory into something that carries itself, but does not cancel the wound it carries. To remain inside the asking.
This is why Carson’s attention to form cannot be understood as aesthetic alone. It is part of the question of how the wound is carried. Grief demands form—something must hold the remainder—but danger lies in forms that promise too much closure, that freeze pain into doctrine, consumable ritual, or theological order. Carson’s practice instead seeks a delicate permeable vessel—eggshell, codex, fragment, silence—to carry the unassimilable forward without trapping it into exchangeable meaning. She conducts this art by staying inside her own house, her own grief.
After her remark on the church’s cleanliness, Carson will recount for us another story, this time about her brother, who doesn’t seem to share the same anxiety;
When he came to stay with me in 1978, two weeks before he ran away, the apartment got dirty, cigarette butts everywhere and at last I was glad he moved on. One morning he butted a cigarette in a frying pan on the stove, sunny side up.[44]
While the church offers the egg as containment — pristine shell, centered yolk, safely housed grief — the brother breaks this symbolic cleanliness from within. His refusal is intimate, proximal, domestic. He enters her home, their shared field of relation, and contaminates the vessel from inside.
The brother's gesture unsettles, offering something ordinary grief structures resist: a kind of radical dispersion. His refusal punctures the wound, scattering its remains and letting its raw yolk spill into the open. But precisely in this dispersal, a strange kind of accumulation begins. The fragments—cigarette ash, yolk, absence—become part of the archive Carson herself assembles.
What cannot be contained returns as fragmentary materials—ash smudged on a sleeve, the yolk staining its way forward—out of which history is still fashioned, even if no true translation can occur. This is the deeper paradox of form that Carson’s historiography undertakes: that dissolution, too, can accumulate; that rupture generates the very matter through which the unassimilable continues to speak.
From this spillage, the field of relation tears open. The brother’s dispersal lays bare the fragility of proximity: when horizontal bonds fracture, their very exposure invites the pressure to secure what now feels unsteady. Yet even here, grief clings like yolk to porous edges, seeping outward. In that saturation lies the temptation: to scrape it clean, to extract grief from its unstable field and stabilize it—ritualize it, theologize it, sanitize it.
This is the deeper lure of the God-parent frame: it promises to lift grief out of messy mutuality and house it inside clean containers of vertical order. But in doing so, it freezes what was once dynamic, renders inert what was once trembling with unresolved presence. Carson’s rage resists precisely this: the displacement of living grief into objecthood, the quiet erasure of exposure beneath the smooth authority of mastery. The sibling wound is brought forth through the exposure of relation’s very contingency, and the danger that our response to that contingency will replicate the wound we fear.
Carson’s grief thus orients her toward confrontation with the more subtle anxiety that haunts all acts of form-making: that as grief leaks into structure, each vessel silently carries the temptation to stabilize—to make it make sense. The question that shadows every memorial form is always: why? We crave orientation—an account that explains, locates, and restores coherence. And yet it is precisely this hunger, Carson suggests, that risks locking grief into structures which promise security, but only by hollowing out the truth that grief resists closure. As she reflects:
We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here’s why. It makes forms a lock against oblivion. Does it?[45]
Her final question pivots the inquiry away from why entirely. It becomes not a search for cause, but for how grief is carried—how form behaves under the pressure of loss. Carson’s history is born from the asking; Why did I survive my brother; Why did he run away? However, as she herself will tell us, “What he needed from me I had no idea.”[46] The shift from why to what marks a turning in Carson’s logic. Why demands explanation, a structure that would fasten pain to reason. What, by contrast, attends to the remainder—the fragment left in grief’s wake.
She observes that even in the first sentence of Herodotus’ Histories, the first sentence of history, contains this structural tension;
Of Herodotus of Halicarnassus’ history this [is] the showing forth, so that deeds done by men not go extinct nor great astonishing works produced by Greeks and barbarians vanish, and in particular on account of what cause they went to war with one another (1.1).[47]
Herodotus names the impulse that drives his project—to prevent deeds from vanishing, and to account for why they occurred. The invocation of cause hovers there: on account of what cause they went to war with one another. “He says he wants to lock deeds to showing and prohibit all of it flowing away into nothing,” Carson tells us, “But the relation of the parts of this sentence, of this project, to one another is obscure: [is] at the start is added by me, the first sentence of history has no main verb.”[48] No act secures the link between event and explanation. The structure exposes a disjunction: the facts may be preserved, but their reasons remain unstated, floating in anticipation.
From Carson’s vantage, history longs to stabilize meaning. Yet from its first articulation, that longing already falters. The gap between deed and cause leaks open—not through absence of data, but through the grammar that strains to fasten what grief and conflict continually unfasten.
Consider the story she tells of Hekataios, who likened the writing of his book to the grief ritual of the sacred phoenix. As she tells this story, Carson asks if
…maybe he comes to see the immensity of the mechanisms in which he is caught, the immense fragility of his own flying—composed as it is of these ceaselessly passing shadows carried backwards by the very motion that devours them, his motion, his asking.[49]
Traditionally, the phoenix burns and rises—a self-contained cycle of death and rebirth. But in Carson’s hands, this logic is quietly elongated. The fire which transforms the bird is thus reimagined as a perverse force that drags shadows backwards, embedded within the act of flight. Each beat of the wing generates forward momentum, paradoxically contributing to an internal erosion. The "shadows" composing its body ceaselessly drag backwards as residue, ensuring the past is not simply remembered but actively folded into the present, always pulling the future towards what has been. Carson thus describes a continuous structure of movement that, while seeming to sustain, simultaneously and relentlessly diminishes.
Crucially, this very process of being worn down by one's own "immense fragility" becomes the means through which the self is relentlessly exposed to its own recursive body as it is vulnerably moved through time, allowing illusions of straightforward progress or triumphant rebirth to be stripped away. What remains is an unflinching, unadorned recognition of one's fundamental impermanence—the intricate construction gained through a sense of clarity towards precisely how one is caught within these mechanisms they use to survive.
So too with Carson: her asking does not restore her brother or make sense of his disappearance. It exposes the immensity of the loss, and the fragility of her own motion through it. I might describe her as reaching for a form of peace that emerges from staying with the disjunction. Her grief remains alive in its refusal—she fashions a practice of staying with herself through her brother as shadow.
Archives of Understanding
Nox presents an interesting methodology for giving a history of someone. Filled with pages of her own meditations alongside fragments from her brother’s journals and photographs juxtaposed between lexical entries for each of the Greek words used in Catullus 101 as they might be translated into English.
She does not explain the poem until about three fourths of the way through the text, where she will tells us;
I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, where one gropes for the light switch…[50]
and
Prowling the meanings of words, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, hovering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.[51]
Carson cannot translate her brother, but she can fashion a way of asking that allows her to carry the weight. Instead of grand illumination, she describes a process of prowling the meanings of words, prowling the history of a person. The verb prowl evokes an instinctual, stealthy seeking through dense underbrush—alert, repetitive, drawn again and again to traces that may once have been fruitful. It’s a movement both patient and predatory, returning by intuition rather than plan, much like the phoenix’s endless recursive motion through its lives. This kind of searching models a vigilant yet tender attention: an erotic engagement with what resists capture, moving through language not to possess it, but to stay close to its living heat.
This is in contrast to "all those little kidnaps in the dark," which foregrounds the unsettling and inherently problematic nature of trying to grasp the totality of another human being or their experience. These "kidnaps" seem to imply brief, perhaps even ethically ambiguous, moments where we illicitly snatch fragments of meaning or identity from one another, particularly when the person we are snatching is distant or gone. It speaks to the force and appropriation inherent in the act of interpretation, suggesting that our attempts to "know" or "possess" another's history can feel like a violation, a furtive capture of something that resists full surrender.
The work of translation, if it is to honor grief, must become a tactile, uncertain groping or sniffing through language without a master key. Carson refuses the clean act of rendering one thing into another, of converting her brother into legibility. She rages by attending to the swarm of connections that circulate in and through her attempts to metabolize meaning.
This is directly demonstrated by the inclusion of the lexical entries in Nox. For example;
frater
frater fratris masculine noun
[cf. Skt bhratar, Gk φράτηρ] a son of
the same father or mother, brother;
frater germanus: a full brother; (plural)
brother and sister; (plural, transferred)
of a kindred race; (especially vocative,
as an affectionate way of referring to a
person of one’s own age); (as a
euphemism for a partner in an irregular
sexual union); (as an honorific title for
allies); (referring to a member of a
religious club; cum fratre Lycisce : with
dear old Lycis (of a dog).[52]
These dictionary fragments offer a kind of clarity that proliferates. Each entry presents multiple, often divergent, definitions for each Greek word, forcing the reader into the same uncertain groping through instability she describes.The lexicon thereby enacts a choice to perform the barking web of language: recursive, luminous, and unresolved. In this way, Carson shows us how the act of translation becomes indistinguishable from the act of mourning.
Carson informs this choice by telling us that a
historian can be a storydog that roams around Asia Minor collecting bits of muteness like burrs in its hide. Note that the word “mute” (from the Latin mutus and the Greek μύειν) is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.[53]
The figure of the storydog reveals a paradox of approach and residue. To roam is to move forward by drifting sideways: brushing against histories that do not speak in declarations but cling like burrs, almost accidental. The field that seems empty—yielding, passive, blank—proves fertile precisely through its apparent barrenness: it hides seeds, soft hollows, faint tracks that give themselves only in passing. The storydog gathers their archive by letting themselves be marked. These “burrs of muteness” are the paradox embodied: fragments that resist coherence yet draw the body deeper into contact. Carson’s historian thereby becomes heroic in their ability to be receptive, moving slowly and close to the ground.
Next to the imagery of the egg, one of the mute burrs of Carson that has stuck to my side is the image of the dog. The dictionary entries, such as Frater’s “cum fratre Lycisce,” show how even the word that should hold the wound tight (brother) slips sideways into the world of dogs, lovers, club-fellows. The brother is never only the brother. The egg leaks, the yolk stains. Yet, there is something about the dog that nags at me. It is loyal and low to the ground, padding after grief without language. The word wanders off with a mutt at its side, as if relation itself limps after loss, tethered to what is both companion and remainder.
This very act of slippage and layered reimagining of archetypes is central to Carson’s most famous book, Autobiography of Red. At its core, the book reworks the ancient Greek myth of Geryon and Herakles, but Carson's approach is not a singular departure; it is an extension of a myth already in flux. In the original accounts of Herakles' Tenth Labor, the hero journeys to the island of Erytheia to steal the famed red cattle of the three-bodied giant Geryon, slaying Geryon, and his two-headed dog, Orthrus.
However, as Carson shows, the Greek lyric poet Stesichorus had already radically retold this myth in his Geryoneis, shifting the focus from Herakles' heroic deed to an introspection from Geryon's perspective. Carson, in turn, elongates this interiority, recasting the myth in a modern frame as a love story between Herakles and Geryon. Carson’s Geryon is birthed already within a lexicon—part myth, part boy, part monster, part hero—he wanders the edges of form like the stray brother who leaves his ash in the frying pan.
Despite these radical narrative and ontological shifts, a striking constant persists across all three versions of the telling of Geryon’s story: Geryon's dog, Orthrus, dies. In the original myth, Orthrus is simply an obstacle, an asset of Geryon's to be destroyed by Herakles on his quest for the cattle. This makes the dog a primary casualty of commodification, its loyalty and existence secondary to its role in Geryon's wealth, easily discarded for the hero's gain. Even in Stesichorus's humanized account, and crucially in Carson's tender reimagining, the loyal "brother-dog" is always closest to the wound's edge. Its death repeats like a quiet ritual forfeiture, a reminder that while identities can slip, twist, and multiply, certain bonds are steadily spent to enforce the lexical container of selfhood they shelter.
This points to a deeper truth: the wellspring of raw, uncontained relation—often deemed uncultured or tangential to the main narrative—is deliberately walled off for the sake of definition. This very act of exclusion, however, immediately initiates a pervasive wounding, or darkening, within the self and its emerging story. It reveals that the imposition of strict lexical limits, while seemingly bringing clarity, carries the cost of severing vital connections.
So when Carson wonders in Nox, for example,
What if you made a collection of lexical entries, as a someone who is asked to come up with a number for the population of the Skythians might point to the bowl at Exampaios.[54]
she is pointing at this double bind: the bowl, like the lexicon, is a vessel shaped by what it melts down. Arrowheads become census, plurality becomes unit. But this act of forming a vessel, this very creative impulse to define and contain, is not without its cost. The dog’s death seems to show what the bowl cannot say outright—that the price of such definition is always a hidden wound. Orthrus’s death is the necessary womb that allows the story to keep its shape. In Carson’s grammar, what stains the vessel seeds its shape. No account or word can hold fully what it must break to come into being.
The tragedy in Autobiography, then, is not Geryon’s singular dying but this smaller death that precedes it—proof that some kin must break so the narrative of self can fit within its defining limits. The brother leaks. The dog dies. The cattle are driven off. The word wanders, leaving its soft hide behind.
This understanding finds visceral expression in Carson's telling of a story involving her brother's dog:
When my brother died his dog got angry, stayed angry, barking, growling, lashing, glaring, by day and night. He went to the door, he went to the window, he would not lie down. My brother's widow, it is said, took the dog to the church on the day of the funeral. Buster goes right up to the front of Sankt Johannes and raises himself on his paws on the edge of the coffin and as soon as he smells the fact, his anger stops. "To be nothing- is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?" asks a dog in a novel I read once (Virgina Woolf Flush 87). I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Smell of autopsy.[55]
Buster’s relentless, uncontainable anger is told as if it is a direct embodiment of a fierce, wordless protest against the neat containment of loss. He doesn't seek definition; he seeks the fact of his brother's absence. His journey to the coffin and his direct encounter with "the smell of nothing" is the ultimate act of confronting the moment where the "barking web of language" meets absolute silence.
What emerges from this confrontation, however, isn't simply an emptiness. The "smell of autopsy," as opposed to the traditional telling of autopsy as fact-of-site becomes the ultimate “mute burr” that cannot be fitted into any lexical entry, yet it yields a profound and unexpected peace. This is Carson showing us a different sort of holding together, a non-linguistic fact that transcends conventional understanding of epistemic and ontological fact gathering. This other fact is visceral, feral at the edges of legibility, yet it offers a form of coherence that written language, by its very nature, must sacrifice.
And Your Little Dog Too?
Of all the passages in Nox, there is one that I find to be the most personally striking;
In cigarette-smoke-soaked Copenhagen, under a wide thin sorrow sky, as swans drift down the water, I am looking for a long time into the muteness of my brother. It resists me. He refuses to be “cooked” (a modern historian might say) in my transactional order. To put this another way, there is something that facts lack. “Overtaklessness” is a word told me by a philosopher once: das Unumgängliche - that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts - it remains beyond them.[56]
Carson's meditation here crystalizes the central tension that runs through threads I like to touch in her work: the human desire to eat other people, to "cook" someone into a tender "transactional order" of facts that continually meets the intractable resistance of an interdependent reality.
This leads her to the concept of "das Unumgängliche" – the unavoidable nausea of "overtakeless". It defines a kind of truth of self and other that exists precisely beyond the reach attempts at legibility. We can gather facts about it, but it remains stubbornly outside our conceptual grasp, always resisting a full accounting. This unumgängliche is thus said to be a truth that "likes to show itself hiding."
Her brother's muteness is rendered animal in its refusal to be domesticated by linguistic or historical frameworks. Taking this seriously makes the historian into a prowler rather than a butcher—one who must move sideways, brush against the hidden, knowing the appetite to consume is the force the wound outpaces.
Carson tells us that a historian could be a storydog, but to do so demands an ontological shift: from eating knowledge as fact to sniffing its traces, relinquishing mastery for the slow, animal work of following what resists capture despite the perils of potential collapse. In light of this, I cannot give you any facts about Anne Carson without following these Facts with Questions and Answers;
QUESTIONS;
How can the earth of grief be ‘got round’ when it is constantly eroded by the pilgrimage of its own asking?
How does confronting the 'smell of nothing,' generate different forms of relation with more animal ways of knowing and expressing fact?
FINALLY
Is it time to ask about the little red dog?[57]
Footnotes;
[1] Carson, Autobiography, 37
[2] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated. This is a fold out book, a facsimile of a handmade book Carson put together after the death of her brother.
[3] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[4] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[5] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[6] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[7] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[8] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[9] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[10] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[11] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[12] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[13] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[14] Carson, Variations, 2
[15] Carson, Variations, 2
[16] Carson, Variations, 2
[17] Carson, Variations, 2
[18] Carson, Variations, 3
[19] Carson, Variations, 2
[20] Carson, Variations, 2
[21] Carson, Variations, 2
[22] Carson, Variations, 2
[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Carson
[24] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[25] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[26] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[27] https://theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-anne-carson
[28] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[29] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[30] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[31] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 28
[32] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 34
[33] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 34
[34] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 34
[35] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 34
[36] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 34
[37] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 34
[38] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 35
[39] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 35
[40] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 35-36
[41] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 37
[42] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 37
[43] Carson, Economy of the Unlost, 38
[44] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[45] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[46] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[47] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[48] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[49] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[50] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[51] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[52] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[53] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[54] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[55] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[56] Carson, Nox (New York: New Directions, 2010), unpaginated.
[57] Carson, Autobiography of Red, 149
