Float Summary
Anne Carson

Float Overview

Anne Carson's latest, genre-bending anthology, Float, is comprised of 22 chapbooks of poetry, prose, essays, lists, and dramas, all of which range in subject from Pronouns to marriage, to grief to Dionysus. No one chapbook is necessarily more important than any other, and indeed, these chapbooks are meant to be read in whatever order, and at whatever pace, the reader desires, which makes reading Float "[like] a freefall," as the collection's back cover reminds us: an endless stumbling between and among significations. Carson chooses to write in this seemingly disjunctive fashion as a means of exploring themes of interpretation and connectivity, and in so doing demonstrates how acts of reading are like acts of translation, which is to say: both locate and allocate meaning depending on the attention, intellectual interest, and interpretive capacity of the reader or translator themselves.