Nox [Hardcover]

Anne Carson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2010

Anne Carson’s haunting and beautiful Nox is her first book of poetry in five years—a unique, illustrated, accordion-fold-out “book in a box.”

Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry. 50 color and black-and-white prints

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In order to discuss Carson's latest work—a foldout, Jacob's ladder collage of letters, photographs, and poetry, all housed in a beautiful box—one must first address its resistance to being addressed. Rather, what Carson does (and with furious precision) is impress upon us her grief over a life she cannot recapture—for Carson, this life is her brother's, for whom this collection is both an elegy and a history. What results is a work of astonishing candor, in which Carson manages to define the elegy anew by exploring the lacunae of her brother's life. It is when you are asking about something, she writes, that you realize you have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself. Carson accomplishes just that, creating a physical record of a life in the form of a book that allows its fragments to carry her brother's absence. To call this art object extraordinary—more than a book, it's a reproduction of a scroll Carson made by hand—would be to understate. What Carson has given us is an act of devotion of such integrity that it carries its grief on its back. (Apr.)
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Review

“She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.” (Susan Sontag )

“Nox’s intelligence, sadness, and wry humor alone might be enough, but its form takes me even more. To read is sensual. You handle the folds, opening one winged pair at a time or in quick, slinky unfurlings. And this read is not linear, with pages dissolving behind you as you turn, but spatial, more like letting your eyes wander a room. With the whole book unfurled you see it entire and make links among images, like a staircase or an egg that reappear folds apart, and among words like ash, festive, blush. You prowl the book itself.” (The Millions )

“The book is an extraordinary object to behold, and more extraordinary to read, but it's hardly accurate to even call it a ‘book.’ It's perhaps 10 feet of paper, folded accordion-like, displaying as near a reproduction of Carson's original collage journal as is possible. The whole thing is folded and packed into a beautiful gray box….The result is breathtaking, evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical.” (Publishers Weekly )

“Rarely has forking over thirty dollars felt like such a solemn act of memorial.” (New York Review of Books )

“Anne Carson is a poet who likes to get under people’s skin.” (Melanie Rehak - The New York Times Magazine )

“Carson has . . . created an individual form and style for narrative verse. . . . Seldom has Pound’s injunction ‘Make It New’ been so spectacularly obeyed.” (The New York Review of Books )

“Trust me: it's an Anne Carson book. Maybe her best....The book is totally recherché and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed. Precious in the word’s best sense.” (Ben Ratliff - The New York Times Book Review )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; First Edition edition (April 27, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811218708
• ISBN-13: 978-0811218702
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.2 x 2.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,927 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #39 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Poetry

More About the Author

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur "Genius" Award.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'night, Brother, May 31, 2010

By 

Emily Whitman (Boston MA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nox (Hardcover)

"No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history."

More an experience than a read, "Nox" by Anne Carson splices abstraction--definitions, quotations, lessons in ancient Greek history--with the concrete specificity of family photographs, handwritten letters, and personal recollections that attempt to contain a fragile and fragmented relationship. Carson's brother, who led a transitory and difficult life, has died in Copenhagen. And now Carson, in the manner of Catallus (poem 101), must go to see her brother's widow, the city where he lived, and the church he was brought to when he died. In words and images, and in words as images, Carson creates a landscape that mirrors memory--a continuous accordion-folded page that backdrops black and white snapshots, yellowing letters, cancelled stamps, and cut-out text. Most striking are the photos that include shadows, and texts that Carson repeats, strikes out, or blurs. Also haunting is the way this collage seems so very real on the reproduced page: edges of paper-on-paper look sharp and true, or wrinkled from too much glue; staples seem raised, shiny and cold; even the reverse-embossing of handwriting forces this reader to touch and expect to feel the raised imprint of a ball-point pen, as if, in feeling, the question is asked: is this real?

Carson explains, "History and elegy are akin." In questioning, "are these staples real?" or "who was this brother?" we share in the act of asking, of composing the story and creating history. In her distilled and disjointed--yet accessible--way, Carson compels questions, collects facts--or shards of them--and assembles a beautiful, tactile, white-space filled elegy that honors a brother who, later in life, she barely knew. "You have survived it, " Carson writes, "and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself." Carson has fashioned a thing that carries itself, a work of poetry and prose that stands on its own as book and non-book, object and message: an account of one's life as an extraordinary ordinary thing.

68 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding, April 22, 2010

By 

Meerschaum "end user" (Vancouver, B.C., Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nox (Hardcover)

Stunning. Carson is a poet and classicist who is truly sui generis. Her new work, Nox, is a scrapbook of pictures, drawings, stamps, scribbles, anecdotes and definitions of the words comprising Catullus' poem No. 101 ("for his brother who died in the Troad") that coalesce into a profoundly haunting, moving and surprisingly vulnerable elegy for the poet's brother. Ignore the obnoxious and narrow minded poetic purists, such as Robert Potts, who deride Carson's work as "doggerel". Her unique and eclectic voice is a breath of fresh air in a medium too often stifled by orthodoxy.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing, December 10, 2010

By 

R. Ross (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nox (Hardcover)

This is an astonishing work. To speak cursorily, the work begins with a latin poem of Catullus' and then goes on to provide a dictionary translation of each word over its course, with anecdotes and pictures interspersed throughout either abstractly or explicitly depicting her mother and more often her brother. Her goal, I suspect, is to show the plurality of language, and the numerous possibilities for any word and thus the infinite possibilities should they be put side by side and reified in another language. As she says "the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of [words] that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate" will appear when attempting to translate. When she finally does translate the poem, it is evasive, inexact, and, most importantly, entirely subjective. Just as we (at least in Northrop Frye's estimation) create works anew in our mind, so does she, concretely, in transmutating Catullus' words to English and Carson's grasp thereon. The book ends, finally, with her translation more vividly rendered inefficient in a bleeding, crumpled fragment (a rip at the top, its medium reasserted at the bottom of the page; that is, a blank piece of paper concluding the book) expressing her inability to translate that original poem and thus asking us to individualize the poem in her directed latin lesson constituting the work.

This is not an easy work to understand, and, as one previous reviewer said, it is not, in the conventional sense, a 'book.' It doesn't follow an expected path--she lays her brother to rest in its cascading first words
"NOX
FRATER
NOX"
overlaying a cursive, similarly cascading inscription of her brother's name--and thus concerns herself with how language associates with emotions, and the utter subjectivity of words which we often believe to express universal pains and joys. She is often terse, often distended, expatiating on matters of which she has little material (her brother's demise) and passing over experiences over which she presided (her mother's passing) but this is all to an overall goal, which is inextricably linked to that poem of Catullus' which opened the poem.

To consider its form for a moment, as it is unconventional. Whereas a normal work of literature is printed on a series of glued or sewn together pages which, if ripped out, don't disturb its physical sequence all too much, this is printed on a series of folded together panels, which, if separated in any way aside from first to last, would render the work a mess, with no page numbers to reorder it by. This work is a sequence of thoughts, a linear meditation driven by its material form and complemented by its content. Another note on this is an opening line of Carson's "I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds." You'll find this to be a rather dark work, but should you unfold the work and flip it over, you will find nothing but light; vacant, vacuous whiteness. She relegates that light to the obverse, acknowledging its insufficiency to express her purpose.

The work is elusive in spite of its subject matter--I don't feel that I know Carson for having read this--and it reminds me of a number of theorists I've read, who bicker between one another the ability or inability of words to express intangible things, but I don't know that any of them did such so capably as Anne Carson does in this work. She individualizes the work to herself but finally leaves it to her reader for conclusions, understanding the inability of words to universally reify what they nominally signify, and I cannot recommend this work enough to anybody, as I feel she realizes her goal beautifully.