Anne Carson's poetry - characterized by various reviewers as "short talks", "essays", or "verse narratives" - combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own. Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson in Glass, Irony and God weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay", a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah", a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome", about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

A literary event: a follow-up to the internationally acclaimed poetry bestseller Autobiography of Red ("Amazing" -- Alice Munro) that takes its mythic boy-hero into the twenty-first century to tell a story all its own of love, loss, and the power of memory. In a stunningly original mix of poetry, drama, and narrative, Anne Carson brings the red-winged Geryon from Autobiography of Red, now called "G," into manhood, and through the complex labyrinths of the modern age. We join him as he travels with his friend and lover "Sad" (short for Sad But Great), a haunted war veteran; and with Ida, an artist, across a geography that ranges from plains of glacial ice to idyllic green pastures; from a psychiatric clinic to the somber housewhere G's mother must face her death. Haunted by Proust, juxtaposing the hunger for flight with the longing for family and home, this deeply powerful verse picaresque invites readers on an extraordinary journey of intellect, imagination, and soul.

Following her widely acclaimed Autobiography of Red ("A spellbinding achievement" --Susan Sontag), a new collection of poetry and prose that displays Anne Carson's signature mixture of opposites--the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse. In Men in the Off Hours, Carson reinvents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St. Augustine, and Catullus through a modern lens. She sets up startling juxtapositions (Lazarus among video paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war). And in a final prose poem, she meditates on the recent death of her mother. With its quiet, acute spirituality, its fearless wit and sensuality, and its joyful understanding that "the fact of the matter for humans is imperfection," Men in the Off Hours shows us "the most exciting poet writing in English today" (Michael Ondaatje) at her best.

The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present. Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist "Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje "This book is amazing--I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing." --Alice Munro "A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." --The New York Times Book Review "A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday." --The Village Voice

The poetry and prose collected in Plainwater are a testament to the extraordinary imagination of Anne Carson, a writer described by Michael Ondaatje as "the most exciting poet writing in English today." Succinct and astonishingly beautiful, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form, while juxtaposing classical and modern traditions. Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.

Poetry. Deluxe redesign of the two-time Griffin Award winner's first poetry collection. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the first of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. New material includes a foreword by the poet Margaret Christakos, a "Short Talk on Afterwords" by Carson herself, and cover art and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. First issued in 1992, SHORT TALKS is Carson's first and only collection of poems published with an independent Canadian press. It announced the arrival of a profound, elegiac and biting new voice. SHORT TALKS can comfortably stand alongside Carson's other bestselling and award-winning works. The renowned ancient Greek scholar's first book beautifully reprinted on amazing paper, with an extra "short talk" on afterwords functioning as the afterword. Sometimes humorous, other times eerie, these prose-poems range in topic from waterproofing to Gertrude Stein at 9:30 at night--the most fascinating micro-lectures you'll ever attend. Nobody has not bought this book after opening it. --Open Books Indie Recommend

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author’s characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.