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Anne Carson

Nox Hardcover – Illustrated, April 27, 2010

by Anne Carson (Author)

192 ratings

4.4 on Goodreads

3,277 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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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

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

New Directions
Publication date

April 27, 2010
Dimensions

6.1 x 2.7 x 9.4 inches
ISBN-10

0811218708
ISBN-13

978-0811218702
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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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"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

"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

"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

"Anne Carson is a poet who likes to get under people’s skin."
― Melanie Rehak, The New York Times Magazine

"Rarely has forking over thirty dollars felt like such a solemn act of memorial."
― New York Review of Books

"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

"She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote."
― Susan Sontag

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions; Illustrated edition (April 27, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0811218708
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811218702
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.7 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 2.7 x 9.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #45,307 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #84 in American Poetry (Books)

Customer Reviews:
192 ratings

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Anne Carson

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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

5 star		82%
4 star		7%
3 star		6%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Emily Whitman

'night, Brother

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 31, 2010

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"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.

62 people found this helpful

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Q in PA

It’s Anne Carson…what more can I say…🤔

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 1, 2021

Verified Purchase

First Off: My book arrived ahead of schedule in Excellent Condition from “Nana Pie’s Book Nook”
in CT, a Veteran owned & run business. I’ve wanted this work since it’s publication, but then there was “the price” 😱. A bit steep for me, and so I waited.
Couldn’t be happier with the book or my experience with this seller. Let’s Support Our Vets !
Now to delve into this beautifully conceived and executed book…Like a treasure from the past. 😉

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An Ordinary Man in New Haven

Her glory. If only . . .

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

I adore Anne Carson. She may well be our (the English language’s) most compelling (insert “greatest” if you will) living poet. And I believe that NOX is (so far – hint hint) her masterwork.

Poets must be in their essential being lateral above vertical thinkers. And she is supreme. All enters in, yet all belongs. And even a modestly attentive reader will easily be drawn in, and across and into their own thinking, their own lives.

However, my “review” is mostly an entreaty. To Anne Carson, to New Directions. Though I completely understand the necessity of the folding structure of this work, I long for a “reading copy”. A paperback – even, heaven help us, a Kindle edition – so that I might more easily take it with me when I go . . . even a very small formatted paperback I could stick in my pocket, as readers used to do in the OLD DAYS.

I need this work as a book to be with me, in addition to its marvelous place on my desk, ready to be unfolded . . . but only there with plenty of room to do so.

8 people found this helpful

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Tim M.

A delight to hold and read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

This is poetry as memorial and history in a fine example of the book maker's art.

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tola

Best as poetic physical artwork

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 7, 2011

Verified Purchase

This work is quite perplexing. In some ways it is magnificent, but in other ways it may fail your expectations - depending on what you are expecting. Rather than giving just one rating, I'd prefer to give the book several ratings:
Book as physical and visual artwork: 5 out of 5
Book as conceptual poetry: 4 out of 5
Book as traditional novel: 2 out of 5

Personally I loved to skim the book randomly, but to read it trough from cover to cover (as I eventually did) was clearly not the best way to enjoy this book, at least for me. The fragmented memories of his brother were at times touching and full of complex emotions. The repeating definitions of latin words were a bit tiresome at times, but still quite educative and hence interesting.

I would say that this book is at its best as an experimental poetic artwork and surely is an unique and at times touching curiosity on any book-lovers shelve. But don't approach the book as a traditional novel - there it will fail you.

12 people found this helpful

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Jennifer Dick

Mourning has never been so beautiful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2014

Verified Purchase

Anne Carson's Nox allows us to feel like we have gone through parts of or remainders from her scrapbook. torn bits of photos and text make up this xylophone-open-out book which, if we are in a room large enough, can spread across the vastness of a space and remind us of the literal line of a life, the lifeline of the brother lost, sought, recalled, reached at or through or towards in this lovely book put out by New Directions at what seems to me to be a strikingly affordable price for such an item. Contained in a box, Nox is like something we have pulled out of the attic and dive into, exploring for what it contains, but also for what it evokes in each of us.

4 people found this helpful

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Nina L.

Great book, arrived dented.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 10, 2021

Verified Purchase

This arrived with a big dent in the cover. It was for a gift, and too late to return it and reorder it. Disappointing. Fabulous product, would buy it elsewhere next time.

Rosemary McNally

Fantastic service

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 20, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a Christmas present for my daughter which she has chosen and I'm sure she will be delighted .

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 26, 2015

Verified Purchase

A beautiful book, with an original layout.

Johnny Darkness

An eccentric contemplation as an elegy

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 16, 2011

Verified Purchase

First, I'll start with the physical "book".
It is a box that looks like a handsome book. When it opens, you have two half-boxes with three sides, joined by the cover, which lies flat. The elegy itself is an accordion of pages - with a thick card cover front and back - that lifts from the box; the pages unfold. Me? - I would buy it just for that.
Then, the elegy.
Carson, a Classics professor (PhD), shows her erudition, but softly, in this work. Parts of the elegy form around a Latin quotation, which is then explained/translated on pages interspersed amongst photographs, collages, cutups, quotations [in English] from Greek and Latin writers, artefacts, memoir, poetic perceptions... indeed, an eccentric elegy. If you enjoy wandering the corridors of an intelligent, sensitive, poetic mind, you will love this book. When the whole collage comes together into a vision, we can appreciate the sense of loss, not only of her brother's life, but of life as we live it negligently - and, as I perceived it, perhaps with my own view whispering in the darkness, the sense of loss and sadness that pervades the life of any person who contemplates the existential circumstances in which all find ourselves, in this short life in this immense universe. I'd buy it just for that, too. Nox

14 people found this helpful

Fabiola Ruiz Lara

El libro viene dañado.

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on December 16, 2019

Verified Purchase

El libro llegó muy rápido, pero viene roto, y es una lástima, ya que es para un regalo.
Solicitaría cambio pero se puede hasta enero del 2020 y lo necesito con urgencia.
Es pésimo que vendan libros rotos o rasgados.

One person found this helpful

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