Red Doc>

by Anne Carson

Overview

**New York Magazine's Top 10 Books of 2013**
**GoodReads Reader’s Choice Award Winner**

Some years ago I wrote a book about a boy named Geryon who was red and had wings and fell in love with Herakles. Recently I began to wonder what happened to them in later life. Red Doc> continues their adventures in a very different style and with changed names.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307950673
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/11/2014
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	227,058
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

Read an Excerpt

TIME PASSES TIME
does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes. Time passing and gazing. Time has no gaze.
Time as perseverance.
Time as hunger. Time in a natural way. Time when you were six the day a mountain. Mountain time.
Time I don’t remember.
Time for a dog in an alley caught in the beam of your flashlight. Time not a video. Time as paper folded to look like a mountain. Time smeared under the eyes of the miners as they rattle down into the mine. Time if you are bankrupt. Time if you are Prometheus. Time if you are all the little tubes on the roots of a gorse plant sucking greenish black moistures up into new scribbled continents.
Time it takes for the postal clerk to apply her lipstick at the back of the post office before the supervisor returns. Time it takes for a cow to tip over. Time in jail. Time as overcoats in a closet.
Time for a herd of turkeys skidding and surprised on ice. All the time that has soaked into the walls here.
Time between the little clicks. Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of the stars. Time for the man at the bus stop standing on one leg to tie his shoe. Time taking
Night by the hand and trotting off down the road.
Time passes oh boy. Time got the jump on me yes it did.
 
—
 
SHUFFLING RECIPES
COUPONS horoscopes in a kitchen drawer he turns up an old B&W
photograph of her posed in dashing swim costume on some long ago back porch.
One leg forward like a
Greek kouros a cigarette in the other hand she glows as a drop of water glows in sun. She looks sexually astute in a way that terrifies him he puts this aside and all at once the grainy photograph the early marvel of her life flung up at him a thing hardly believable! knocks him to his knees. He grips his arms and weeps. Pain catches the whole insides of him and wrings it.
Oddly now remembering his grandmother’s wringer washer silvergreen and upright on a platform of wet boards in her back kitchen beside the washing tubs. How carefully he’d been taught to feed a piece of dripping cloth between the two big lips of the rollers while she cranked the handle and the cloth grabbed fforward to emerge on the other side as a weird compressed pane of itself.
He hadn’t known his grandmother long or well.
She smelled of Noxzema.
Didn’t like doctors.
Believed in herbs and the
Bible. When the apostles walked down the street she said their shadows would heal people. His mother once told him a story about her dying.
They never liked each other hadn’t visited for years but someone arranged a phone call. So there they were mother and daughter on the telephone separate cities separate nights both suffering from asthma and so moved they couldn’t speak. I heard her breathing I knew what it was his mother said. He looks up. He’d almost forgot about the rain.
Unloading on the roof and squandering down the gutters. Rain continuous since the funeral a wrecking rattling bewildering Lethe-
knuckling mob of rain. A
rain with no instructions.
 
—
 
WIFE OF BRAIN
 
Mothers in summer
Mothers in winter
Mothers in autumn
Mothers in spring
 
Mothers at altitude
Mothers in solitude
Mothers as platitude
Mothers in spring
 
Mothers banking their shots
Mothers grackling their throats
Mothers dumped from their boats
In spring
 
Mothers as ice
Or when they are nice
No one more nice
In spring
 
Mothers ashamed and Ablaze and clear
At the end
As they are
As they almost all are, and then
Mothers don’t come around
Again In spring

Editorial Reviews

Breathtaking. . . . Personal, necessary and important. . . . Read this book. You’ll find it hard to forget.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“A supraliterary, textually experimental landscape that only Carson could conjure. Ranging from frozen tundra to festive meadows, G’s odyssey features his dying mother, his war-veteran road-buddy lover, and a female artist friend in a wild hybrid narrative pushed to mythopoetic glory.” —Elle
 
“Carson’s lyrical language effortlessly lifts pure moments of hope and despair off the page. . . . Red Doc> stands on its own—and takes the reader on a singular journey of longing and grief.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Carson’s red-winged anti-hero is still the crown prince of erotic, melancholy foibles. . . . Whether she’s talking war vets, flying cows, Latin etymology or Elvis, Carson once again blurs the lines of prose and poetry.” —American Poet
 
“Unexpected, dizzying.... Sure to be the verse event of the season." —Vogue.com
 
"[Carson's] phrases and images ... swoop and beguile like hidden messages. Cryptograms from other civilizations, or hoaxes perpetrated by pranksters by moonlight? Say what you will about Carson, she doesn't play it safe." —The New York Observer
 
"For every line of Carson's that's grave and pensive, another is funny, erotic, demotic, or dirty.... Even when the setting gets surreal, Carson never breaks faith with ordinary emotion. Red Doc> is, at times, excruciating in its grief. Yet just when it threatens to become unbearable, just when you are hurling at terminal velocity toward the killing earth—just then everything that seemed broken comes together. Suddenly you are borne into the sky on words and stories, those human wings, up there with a thousand ice bats and a kind-hearted monster and a stoner cow and a solid column of volcanic smoke, seamed with brilliant flame." —New York Magazine
 
"A shape-shifting verse novel that's both playful and compelling." —Time Out New York
 
"The events in Red Doc>, not so much recounted as erupting, have an instability suggestive of Alice in Wonderland.... As with a roller coaster, the transitions make us look forward to the next splendid plunge. And we plunge." —The Boston Globe
 
"Carson swings through a variety of techniques that refract the madness of war, from the systemic absurdism of Catch-22 to the post-modern flights of Gravity's Rainbow to the dead-bang temporal concussions of The Things They Carried.... Carson is funny—Lorrie Moore funny, Grace Paley funny—and Red Doc> courses with a wit shot through with intelligence and humility.... Brushed with the magical, the absurd and the surreal." —Paste
 
"Parts of this book are shockingly moving, especially when she describes the impending death of G's mother. The poetry around their final meeting is strangely haunting in an understated way. It presents loss and our tenuous human interconnectedness in its fragile and mysterious passing.... Inspired." —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
 
“Red Doc> is the sequel—sort of—to Autobiography of Red, one of the crossover classics of contemporary poetry. The book is strange and sweet and funny, and the remoteness of the ancient myth crossed with the familiarity of the modern setting creates a particularly Carsonian effect: the paradox of distant closeness.” —The New York Times Magazine
 
“If there is one book I’ve pressed on more people in the past decade, it is Carson's Autobiography of Red. And I’m here to tell you its sequel has just been published, and that it’s pretty much the biggest event of the year…. Red Doc> is insightful, whimsical, erotic and sad.... If you like books to provoke you, dare you, even change the way you think, let me recommend this strange, wonderful pair of novels about a young red man. We all have volcanoes in our lives. Sometimes it takes someone else to show us how to survive them.” —Rosecrans Baldwin, NPR

From the Publisher

Carson remains a master of idiosyncratic figures, delivering metaphor and simile casually and suddenly, while keeping her language idiomatically oddball…To read Carson is continually to be disoriented and reoriented, grabbed and dropped…Read this book. You'll find it hard to forget.

The New York Times Book Review - Daisy Fried

Carson is one of the most famous poets writing in English; her many rabid fans await her new books with eager anticipation. A classicist by training, Carson has found, over a career spanning three decades and 14 books of poetry, prose, drama, and translation (often knitted together into unclassifiable collections), consistently new ways of reinventing the classical myths or of setting mythical material in a hip, jerky contemporary world. This new book is a sequel to the book that first made Carson famous, Autobiography of Red. It takes Geryon, the red demon-boy who starred in that book, ages him to adulthood, renames him “G,” and sets him loose in a confusing, fast-paced contemporary world. A kind of novel in (mostly) prose poetry, this book follows G through familial, erotic, and political discoveries on an eventual road trip with a lover named “Sad.” Throughout, Carson reveals a quirky wisdom, which feels as cool as it does true: “Time passes time does not pass. Time all but passes. Time usually passes.” (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly