Nox

Coursing with intellectual vitality and raw emotion, Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson's Nox is an art object, an elegy for her tormented brother, and an attempt to find a new means for expressing grief while unpacking the language usually reserved for it. Carson's brother Michael was a rambler and outlaw who stayed beyond his family's reach yet always in touch through postcards; on hearing of his death in Copenhagen in 2000, Carson set out to meet Michael's widow and see what she could retain for herself of his mysterious existence. In continuous, accordion-folded pages, Nox pulses with family photos, illustrations, and Carson's heartbreaking and artful candor about what she remembers and what she finds. Counterpointing these personal effects is a word-by-word, dictionary-style deconstruction of the famous Poem 101 written by the Roman poet Catullus on the death of his brother. As Carson conducts her inquiry into the Catullus poem, isolating each word to a single page and taking it through declensions and increasingly lyrical applications, the word's definition expands, becoming unfixed and mirroring Carson's efforts at arriving at some understanding of who her brother was. A sorrowful text that addresses broken links and disconnections through literal links and connections, Nox is a brilliant innovation and an exciting expansion of Carson's unique body of work.