Read By: Miller Wolf Oberman

92Y's Read By

Miller Wolf Oberman on his selection:

I will not try to introduce Anne Carson here. If you are one of the several people who do not know the work of this poet, essayist, and classicist, I will just say I envy you your impending discovery. One of the great joys, for me, of her work is that I am never certain what I’ll find. A scholarly translation of an ancient Greek play? A collaborative reinvention of an ancient text into a graphic novel? A poetry collection? A combination of these things that pours out of a box in a literal accordion, connecting a single, brief lament in Latin to contemporary grief, because what is time? In Carson’s “The Life of Towns,” which comprises one section of her 1995 collection of poems and essays, Plainwater, each line is end stopped, disrupting the sentence as a unit entirely, and interrupting our desire to see a sentence as something whole.

Plainwater at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0