From Anne Carson, the award-winning Canadian author of Autobiography of Red, comes a landmark collection that stretches the boundaries of genre, pressing the traditional form of the essay into new service. In succinct and astonishingly beautiful prose and verse, Anne Carson exposes the fragile differences between "I" and "you," and between the modern and the classical, in a voice that shatters convention with its integrity and clarity.

Carson envisions a present-day interview with a 7th- century BC poet; lectures on subjects as diverse as hedonism and Ovid; imagines a 15th-century painter's muse at a phenomenology conference in Italy; and in the final section presents a poetic travelogue of a woman's life that beautifully contemplates the difference between the sexes. Plainwater is a stunning collection.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. A former MacArthur Fellow, awards for her numerous books include the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Red Doc> was recently awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the inaugural Folio Prize. Her first full poetry collection, Short Talks, was published by Brick Books in 1992 and was presented as a new edition in 2015: SHORT TALKS: BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 1.

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"The most exciting poet writing in English today." --Michael Ondaatje

"Breathtaking...[a] work of gorgeous innovation and a staunch, hypnotic intelligence." -The Village Voice
"Carson has created an individual form and style for narrative verse.-- Seldom has Pound's injunction -- Make It New -- been so spectacularly obeyed." -The New York Review of Books
"Carson writes like an angel--Her passions recall that incandescent chronicler of love Elizabeth Smart [and] Malcolm Lowry's passionate stream of consciousness." -Katherine Govier, TIME