Reviews
Trust me: it's an Anne Carson book. Maybe her best....The book is totally recherch and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed. Precious in the word's best sense., Trust me: it's an Anne Carson book. Maybe her best....The book is totally recherché and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed. Precious in the word's best sense., Nox's intelligence, sadness, and wry humor alone might be enough, but its form takes me even more. To read is sensual. You handle the folds, opening one winged pair at a time or in quick, slinky unfurlings. And this read is not linear, with pages dissolving behind you as you turn, but spatial, more like letting your eyes wander a room. With the whole book unfurled you see it entire and make links among images, like a staircase or an egg that reappear folds apart, and among words like ash, festive, blush. You prowl the book itself., Carson has . . . created an individual form and style for narrative verse. . . . Seldom has Pound's injunction 'Make It New' been so spectacularly obeyed., Nox's intelligence, sadness, and wry humor alone might be enough, but its form takes me even more. To read is sensual. You handle the folds, opening one winged pair at a time or in quick, slinky unfurlings. And this read is not linear, with pages dissolving behind you as you turn, but spatial, more like letting your eyes wander a room. With the whole book unfurled you see it entire and make links among images, like a staircase or an egg that reappear folds apart, and among words like ash, festive, blush. You prowl the book itself., The book is an extraordinary object to behold, and more extraordinary to read, but it's hardly accurate to even call it a 'book.' It's perhaps 10 feet of paper, folded accordion-like, displaying as near a reproduction of Carson's original collage journal as is possible. The whole thing is folded and packed into a beautiful gray box....The result is breathtaking, evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical.
