The scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and errant: anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. This first monographic study of her work, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist makes the case for the acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator as a remarkable experimental scholar and reader, who rehearses scholarly methods while getting sure of their strictures of form and emotion. Carson's attention to sources, ancient and modern, textual or visual, is one of few constants across almost four decades of her published writing, whose uncertain claims on discipline and genre are claimed here as a certain interpretive style.

The book follows Carson's readings through variations in form -- from early academic prose and poem-essays to creative adaptations and works for performance -- to get to grips with what Coles calls Carson's transparency: not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, working process, and intent. Carson's portraits of mediation perform her interventions for us, yet they play compellingly with her commitments to cut mediation, argument, even authorship out of the picture: to poetic economy, constrained writing, chance, impersonation, imitation, and the performative. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and experimental form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now.

Elizabeth Sarah Coles is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where she researches experimental form and method in contemporary critical culture. She studied at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London, and was co-convenor of the Psychoanalysis, History, and Political Life Forum at the School of Advanced Study, London. She is co-editor of Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (2022).

A Note on the Text
Introduction

I. VARIATIONS IN CRITICISM

1. The Eros Variations
2. Criticism and the Gift (Carson with Celan)

II. GLASS ESSAYS

3. On Not Being Emily Brontë
4. Lyric Transparency and the 'Fictional Essay'

III. SPECULATIVE FORM

5. Decreation, or the Art of Disappearance
6. Fake Women

IV. OPEN TRANSLATION

7. Grief Lessons (Two Stories of Translation)
8. Sappho in the Open

Postscript: Short-Talking

Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index