Anne Carson

It might be odd to consider Anne Carson, the author of Float, one of this collection's characters. Yet, as the progenitor of the content depicted within these 22 chapbooks — as the orchestrator, in other words, of this exercise in 'flotage' — and as the implied speaker in such pieces as "Merry Christmas from Hegel" and "Pronoun Envy," it is important to recognize Carson's structural role throughout the volume.

Notorious for her reticence about her personal life, Anne Carson's career is unclassifiable: not just a poet, not just a professor, she often dances — or, maybe, 'floats' — between genres, expectations, forms. Which is to say: testing boundaries, and finding ways of making new meaning, has always been a concern of hers. So much is clear via Float's very form: 22 chapbooks, each of which is individual in content, and each of which can be read in any order, or defined in whatever...