Nox (Hardcover)

Author: Anne Carson 

Publisher: New Directions (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.

"An assemblage of words and images so artfully arranged that they make us reconsider not only what poetry can do and should do but even what a book is…Nox will change the way you read."

–The Believer

"Carson has made an extraordinary object, like the phoenix’s egg, and has supplied us with the sublime logic to understand everything inside of it as provisional, sketched, and partial: it is an edifice built on botched attempts."

–The New York Review of Books

"In its very form, Nox embodies the complexity of loss."

–Print Mag

"[Anne Carson] applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigor, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life."

–New York Magazine