Review by Booklist Review
In Carson's most welcoming and intimate work to date, she loosens the robes of erudition that cloaked Men in the Off Hours [BKL Mr 1 00] in an aura of wry intellectualism. Here the tango provides inspiration for lashingly precise yet sultry and graceful poems that depict the eroticism and possessiveness, competition and resentment of a marriage in dissolution, a process envisioned as both an elaborate dance and vicious warfare. Most poems are written in the voice of the wronged wife, who answers the question, how could she love such a selfish man, by saying, "Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. / As I would again." With Keats as her touchstone, Carson--audacious, funny, poised, and extraordinarily smart--considers our often contradictory needs for beauty and love. She adeptly marshals images of cleanliness and dirt, the story of Persephone, considerations of the intensity and frivolity of game playing, and the dynamics of dialogue to push her piquant inquiry into the nature of desire far beyond familiar parameters. Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
After the Canadian classicist, polymath and MacArthur "genius grant" winner's much-acclaimed verse-novel Autobiography of Red (1997)Äand exactly a year after Men in the Off HoursÄcomes a second book-length, mostly-narrative poem: this charming, edgy, insistently intertextual and finally heartbreaking sequence about unlikely courtship, modern marriage, divorce and "primordial eros and strife." The 29 short chapters Carson calls "Tangos" imagine and analyze, in jaggedly memorable verse, the ill-starred romance between the narrator and her charismatic, needy and unfaithful husband, who writes her romantic letters in her teenage years, introduces her to his tragic friend Ray, cheats on her with women named Merced and Dolor, takes her on a tour of the Peloponnese and begs her to reverse her decision to leave him. The plot emerges through Carson's meditative, elusive fragments, mysteriously isolated couplets, excerpts from versified conversations and letters, interior monologues and (as Carson's readers have come to expect) digressions on matters of classical scholarship. This kind of thing is imitated badly and often by others, but Carson's phraseology within poems remains her own: "Rotate the husband and expose a hidden side," she urges early on; later, "words// are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend/ to the ground." And if some of Carson's devotees seek just such cryptic moments, others will want, and get, more direct shows of emotion: "Proust/ used to weep over days gone by," she asks the reader, "do you?" (Feb.) Forecast: Carson was the subject of a New York Times Magazine feature this yearÄshe is one of the very few poets writing now to cross over into trade-like sales. The wave of publicity may have crested, but this book should be well reviewed, and name recognition should kick in if the book is displayed along with current fiction, which the subtitle obviously encourages. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A professor of classics at McGill University and the author of Autobiography of Red, a National Book Critics Circle nominee, Carson has rapidly become one of North America's most acclaimed academic poets. But even though she spangles her work with the costume jewelry of literary and historical allusion, challenging the reader with obscure, referential puzzles, she also evinces a rare grasp of emotional chemistry. This "fictional essay" on marriage and adulteryDreally an impressionistic poetic meditationDcuts more truly, more deeply than any plain-spoken confessional monolog, dramatizing inner and outer conflict with a precise, knowing wit. The husband holds "Yes and No together with one hand/ while parrying the words of wife." The wife marvels "at her husband's ability to place the world within brackets." Sensibilities unravel and reassemble as contradictions beget tautologies: "If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you./ Why./ To tell it to." Rooted in a literary consciousness at once Romantic and ironic, this is as fresh and compelling a poetic treatment of a familiar subject as one is likely to find in any century.DFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Is it verse or is it fiction? What a question. The most essential fact is that this is a story, a love story told by poet and novelist Carson (Men in the Off Hours, 2000, etc.) in 29 brief, lyrical tangos (which are kind of like stanzas, only a lot more romantic) that have little quotations from Keats in front of each. Basically, its Girl-meets-Boy, Girl-gets-Boy, Girl-and-Boy-grow-old-and-get-tired-of-each-other. A marriage, in other words. Narrated mostly by the wife, it becomes quickly lugubrious in a sort of Liv Ullmann/Sylvia Plathish kind of way (I believe / your taxi is here she said. / He looked down at the street. She was right. It stung him, / the pathos of her keen hearing), but it is a vivid portrait all the same, razor-sharp and as quick as a flea. The lightness of touch is the saving gracenarrated in standard prose, this would be at once unremittingly drab and thoroughly old hatthat makes this doomed marriage different from all other doomed marriages we have read about. It even makes it feel somewhat less doomed. Slight, and slightly weird, but worth a look.
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