Antigonick

Carson, a poet influenced by authors as diverse as Sappho, Euripides, Emily Brontë, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, is known both for innovative translations of ancient texts and for her restrained but searing confessional poetry (try "The Glass Essay" or The Beauty of the Husband). Some of her best works merge her two roles: Nox, a facsimile of Carson's own scrapbook, presented the reader with notes for a translation of a Catullus' elegy for his brother, poem 101, alongside photographs and notes detailing the history of her own brother, Michael, who died after a long disappearance. Being scholarly and methodical, Nox suggests, has its limits: "Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light," she writes. "Human beings have no main switch."