Negotiations with preposterous debt owed to night. Original accordian-in-a-box form, old obscure photos, handwritten frags, definitions (scans sometimes of wrinkled pages), classical refs, Basho. (David Shields [[book:Reality Hunger: A Manifesto|6712580]] would love it.) Could probably never be more than it is, by which I mean -- not to demean it -- little more than nox (strips of light at night in a box), considering the abstract relationship she apparently had with her troubled absent older br...

This is possibly the most beautifully printed book I have ever seen, art books included. It's like magic, I can't even imagine how they did it. If fire broke out in my apartment house I would grab it, fleeing.

I just..... just..... someone help this is the most beautiful and rich and unique and delicate and powerful and sad and meditative thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. A tribute to her late brother, an attempt at translation, a reflection on words and language and meaning, a grappling with the unknown and the unknowable and the enterprise of history.... all as a long, disjointed yet harmonious poem, and a scrapbook at the same time.... fuck me Anne Carson you’ve done it!!!!

(The following was written for The Millions' A Year in Reading feature, 12/20/12, occurred to me I should also post it here.)Published as poetry, Anne Carson’s Nox is closer by far to W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz than to any book of pocketable lyrics. Ultimately uncategorizable, this physically onomatopoetic facing of the death of a long-absent, long-estranged brother comes (as effects or ashes do) in a box. The pages not sewn, not glued, but accordion-folded into one inseparable, extendable fan of

A gorgeous elegy, a single folded paged collection in a hard cover like a box, for a brother the author no longer knew or could know. It works as a frustrating statement on experiencing the death of a loved one. My best friend died in March of this year, unexpectedly. I’d been struggling on what I want to say at his memorial service next month, but after reading this, I have a better idea of how I can begin.

I purchased this beautiful artefact for my girlfriend last Xmas and received not the rapturous response required. A year later, I had a look. Too many verso entries from the Latin dictionary fail to spoil this quietly affecting and visually calorific tribute to a mercurial dead brother. It is the sort of thing that one might appreciate more in the wake of a loss, as Michael Silverblatt explains in this Bookworm episode, on which Anne Carson reads a poem from the book in Latin.

Video review, along with The Trojan Women and H of H Playbook : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo4Mf...

"Prowling the meanings of a word, 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, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate . . .—Anne Carson, NOX To read NOX is like unwinding an ancient scroll, or following a frieze around the porch of a temple, or tracing a history twisting

the first time I reviewed this, 7 years ago, I thought it was kind of cold and pretentious and wrote a goofy review now I'm reading it again and it is incredibly sad and lovely and beautifully made, so now I feel like a jerk. gonna add a star and tell me from 7 years ago to have a heart, jeez louise

I certainly acknowledge that I am in the minority with my bleak two star rating of this well loved book and if there was a separate category for the "idea" separate from the book itself, I would give Anne Carson 5 stars for sure.The author created this book after the death of her brother in effort to come to terms of his life and death. She did this though a series of poems, definition of words, pictures and other things meaningful to her. The book is thick, unusually shaped with fold-out pages

I had to read this book of poetry for my Modern Elegy English course at my school and I found it very interesting. This was the first elegy we had read by a female author, even though we are well over half way through our quarter. I found the poems themselves very convoluted, but they were still fascinating.I loved the structure of the book itself. It was made to look like a continuous piece of paper, much like a timeline to which someone's life may be measured against. I thought it was really c...

I'm pretty thoroughly depressed after reading this. Actually after reading it twice in one sitting and after watching the second half of Kieślowski's sixth film in the Decalogue series I'm now feeling pretty fucking bleak. Both the film and this book deal with the unknowableness of the other. In the film a young man is in love with an older woman whom he spies on from his bedroom. He watches her with lovers, stalks her, steals her mail, makes phone calls to her and then hangs up and does other c...

Some straightforward observations about Anne Carson's elegy Nox: it comes in a large box, like a rectangular room. Inside the box is a free-floating accordion-style book, which though beautiful is difficult to hold comfortably in the hand; it bends and twists as one turns the pages. The book (the room) opens with an elegy by Catullus for his dead brother, in the original Latin, whose physical appearance is smudged and water-stained, and whose import is, of course, obscure to non-Latin-speaking r...

29/5/21 Update:I think I underrated this book, in retrospect from my original review below. Nox sticks in my memory. I think the ambiguity bothered me. But with time I've seen maturity and necessity for distance in a memoir. This wasn't meant to be easy to understand, but it's a beautiful book, and needs to be seen that way.—15/4/16 Original-On a sunny day like today I decided read the elegy by a writer I might be seeing down the road giving a reading tonight. Life can be strange.Me: I spent my