SOURCE: Wahl, Sharon. “Erotic Sufferings: Autobiography of Red and Other Anthropologies.” Iowa Review 29, no. 1 (spring 1999): 180-88.

In the following review, Wahl asserts that Carson's works effectively combine academic scholarship with lyrical verse, observing that Eros the Bittersweet, Plainwater, and Autobiography of Red form “a sort of trilogy of erotic sufferings.”

I have been a devoted reader of Anne Carson for several years now, and when I saw her novel Autobiography of Red in a bookstore last spring, I bought it immediately. I won't say I didn't even open the book first—I did—and it looked beautiful. Most of the book is written in alternating long and short lines spaced commodiously on the page; not so much “verse” in any strict metrical sense, more like broken up, though poetic, prose:

It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he...