Plainwater : essays and poetry

From Anne Carson, the award-winning Canadian author of Autobiography of Red, comes a landmark collection that stretches the boundaries of genre, pressing the traditional form of the essay into new service. In succinct and astonishingly beautiful prose and verse, Anne Carson exposes the fragile differences between "I" and "you," and between the modern and the classical, in a voice that shatters convention with its integrity and clarity.

Carson envisions a present-day interview with a 7th- century BC poet; lectures on subjects as diverse as hedonism and Ovid; imagines a 15th-century painter's muse at a phenomenology conference in Italy; and in the final section presents a poetic travelogue of a woman's life that beautifully contemplates the difference between the sexes. Plainwater is a stunning collection.

From the Trade Paperback edition.