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I want to crawl inside her brain and live there for a while
Anne Carson puts together several different prose and poetry styles all together to create something beautiful and amazing. It took me a while to adapt to poetry again after a bit of a hiatus, but Plainwater is so good I've started back into a poetry binge of proportions not seen in recent years. It's amazing and lovely and everyone should go read it.
My first encounter with Carson--completely life-changing.
i don’t know how to explain the experience of reading this book except to say that it left me with a ringing sense of loneliness. not the numbing sort of loneliness. just the loneliness you experience as a child. like the feeling of standing on the edge of a great big mountain, looking out over a world and landscape that you do not know and that you fear you will never truly know. you are so small and the trees are especially big, and even the dog you pass on the street is just about your size.
Classic and Capital. In the sense that it's the one that I read first. It's also the one I taught my students and the one they came in to talk about and they write like and the one that we were all reading when my cat died. That passage about Anna. And also the one with the blood oranges. What a comfort an essay is. Who would have known. Also it is the one I bought god so so long ago and it is ruined because I've read it that many times and others have also gotten their hands on it and I found a...
I have to confess, Carson almost lost me with this one. Or at least she came as close to losing me as she has thus far, because parts one and two (which we’ll discuss) were both incredible, and this books last hundred fifty pages are probably the most moving and most original stretch of Anne Carson that I’ve ever read. None of these, let me assure you, are the problem. The problem is “Canicula di Anna,” sits on the same poetic-scholarly faultline as Autobiography of Red. Obviously, Red is a wond...
“we live by waters breaking out of the heart.”i really liked some parts, but, as a whole, i didn't enjoy it as much as i thought i would.
I first found "Kinds of Water", included in this collection, several years before the book appeared and I read it again and again for a decade. It might be the single biggest influence on my writing.
Carson + Homer-adjacent lyric poets = unwilting glory. I adore her translations of Mimnermos and am immoderately grateful for her structural analyses. Makes my heart dizzy! I think I don't love philosophy enough to always truly understand her other poetry, but I sure did enjoy having it in my brain. I always like the way she writes about love, it leaves me with a residue of head-sadness and heart-fear. Her writing always feels multimedia. Not the most exceptional phrase in the book but one that
Loved it. I'm not going to pretend I have a complete grasp on the complexities of this collection yet (I feel like I need to spend years studying history, anthropology, mythology, language) but Anne Carson writes beautifully. Creative, clean. Her words find hollows in me and echo. My copy is littered with post its to mark certain lines, passages. Not a review, but a more personal (?) take here.
emerging from anne carson's writing always feels like stepping out of a fog. god fucking knows if i'll ever be able to articulately review something of hers, but her brain is unrealno rating because i definitely need to sit with and revisit parts of this
i think i had to read "autobiography of red" and "beauty of the husband" to get to trust her enough to go through these shorter, sharper pieces, but this is my favorite anne carson so far. by "trust her," i mean understand that she's lying most of the time, but it's for my own good. i would love to learn to move through truth towards beauty the way she does. unfortunately i'm pretty much convinced that it's not something you can learn.