Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a poet and professor of history at McGill University. She has background in the classics and classical languages, as well as anthropology. She blends ideas and themes from those fields, often modernizing greek myths or refering to ancient philosophy in her poems and essays. She has written several books, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, and non-fiction.

Her works include:
Eros the Bittersweet
Plainwater
Glass, Irony, and God
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
Economy of the Unlost
Men in the Off Hours

some quotes from Plainwater:

"There were places were the luxury droped off, where I waited. I saw something flash open then lost it."

"... like two stars hung in a deep wind in space, who appear motionless as they hurtle toward each other at 186,213 miles per second in a silence that cracks a wall."

"i find interesting the distinction anthropologists make between an emic and an etic point of view.  Emic has to do with the perspective of a member of the society itself and etic is the point of view of an outsider seeing the society in his own terms. Lovers insist on bringing the two perspectives together, a sort of double exposure.  To draw into the very inside of my heart the limit that was supposed to mark it on the outside, your strangeness.  But keep it strange.  Those three things."

"It is easier to tell the story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together."

"Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again"

"Beauty makes me hopeless.  I don't care why anymore I just want to get away."

"My power is of the kind that belongs exclusively to those without power."

"I wanted to find one law to cover all of living, I found fear.  A list of my nightmares is the map of the way out of here. "

"Details are in bad taste.  They expose our infection."

"I sit on my calm heels and listen to this reasoning, although air seems to have all of a sudden entirely left the region of my lungs and heart.  Pleasure is important.  Pleasure is a way of knowing people.  Pleasure is the infinite experiment.  Well before I fell in love I used to reason too.  I was a young fan bandit.  I was a bad bone.  Stop the box."