Anne Carson

Reviews / Votes

By close reading Carson as she so exactingly reads her own temperaments, Coles models with striking delicacy the very entwinement of analytical attention and compositional grace that recurs throughout this book's archive. This is a celebration of the essay's potential as a limber performance of thought, demonstrating what we might continue to learn about unlocking scholarly forms from the range and rebelliousness of Carson's critical itineraries. * David James, author of Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation * Illuminating and original, The Glass Essayist takes the full measure of Anne Carson's achievement to date, from early commentaries on Greek poetry, through poems, translations, essays, lectures, and multi-media collaborations. Via dazzling close readings, Coles makes a bold, compelling argument about Carson's notorious reflexivity, anachronism, and parody in responding to classical and modern writers: these modes reveal 'the unsanctioned emotional life of scholarship,' exposing what is at stake in reading itself. With implications for debates about lyric, translation, performativity, and criticism after critique, this is a work of profound critical sympathy and insight. * Reena Sastri, author of James Merrill: Knowing Innocence * Elizabeth Sarah Coles does a thorough and intelligent job of discussing Carson's career. The monograph covers everything from Eros the Bittersweet to H of H Playbook (2021), a facsimile collage "playbook" - a term that suggests both a collection of strategies for a team playing a game and a playbook in the early modern theatrical sense - about Euripides' Herakles. It is serious and erudite in its scholarship and includes, satisfyingly, hefty footnotes, a bibliography and an index. * A.E. Stallings, Times Literary Supplement * I admire Elizabeth Coles as a stylist at the level of the sentence but also as a thinker. More than a close reading and focused study of Carson, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist elucidates how Carson points the way toward/enacts new forms of thinking and essaying. * Farid Matuk, Author of This Isa Nice Neighborhood, The Real Horse, and Moon Mirrored Indivisible. * To capture something as quicksilver as the work of the great Anne Carson is an achievement in itself but to elaborate a concept ("performative form") that divulges how Carson's aesthetic intentions manifest and effloresce on the page is a mark of brilliance. Elizabeth Sarah Coles's Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist proceeds with aphoristic flair and an erudite array of literary quotations, but what will remain with me is her dazzling invitation to view Carson's oeuvre as a ne plus ultra of mimesis, where the reader participates in a poetic performance "reproducing or mirroring an original experience so that it might happen again in reading or recital. * David Woo, Author of Divine Fire * Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist is a rare achievement. Elizabeth Sarah Coles brings to Carson's corpus a level of attention and imagination every bit as exacting and dynamic as Carson's own. * MSA First Book Prize Committee, 2024 *