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Float
From the renowned classicist and MacArthur Prize winner: a new collection that explores myth and memory, beauty and loss, all the while playing with—and pushing—the limits of language and form.
Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. Float reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise. Presented in an arrestingly original format--individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case--this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories "maddeningly attractive" when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.
One can begin with Carson contemplating Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, or on the art-saturated streets of downtown New York City. Or journey to the peak of Mount Olympus, where Zeus ponders his own afterlife. Or find a chorus of Gertrude Steins performing an essay about falling--a piece that also unearths poignant memories of Carson's own father and great-uncle in rural Canada. And a poem called "Wildly Constant" piercingly explores the highs and lows of marriage and monogamy, distilled in a wife's waking up her husband from the darkness of night, and asking him to make them eggs for breakfast.
Exquisite, heartbreaking, disarmingly funny, Float kaleidoscopically illuminates the uncanny magic that comes with letting go of expectations and boundaries. It is Carson's most intellectually electrifying, emotionally engaging book to date.
Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. Float reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise. Presented in an arrestingly original format--individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case--this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories "maddeningly attractive" when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.
One can begin with Carson contemplating Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, or on the art-saturated streets of downtown New York City. Or journey to the peak of Mount Olympus, where Zeus ponders his own afterlife. Or find a chorus of Gertrude Steins performing an essay about falling--a piece that also unearths poignant memories of Carson's own father and great-uncle in rural Canada. And a poem called "Wildly Constant" piercingly explores the highs and lows of marriage and monogamy, distilled in a wife's waking up her husband from the darkness of night, and asking him to make them eggs for breakfast.
Exquisite, heartbreaking, disarmingly funny, Float kaleidoscopically illuminates the uncanny magic that comes with letting go of expectations and boundaries. It is Carson's most intellectually electrifying, emotionally engaging book to date.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2016
About the author
Anne Carson
94 books5,776 followersAnne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and one of the most distinctive contemporary writers in English. Born in Toronto in 1950, she studied Classics at the University of Toronto and has taught Ancient Greek and Classics at universities including McGill University, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University.
Carson’s work crosses conventional boundaries between poetry, fiction, essay, literary criticism, translation, drama, and visual art. Drawing extensively on Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, she frequently translates, reimagines, and places classical texts and figures in dialogue with modern life. Her writing combines scholarly erudition with formal experimentation and recurring concerns with love, desire, loss, beauty, grief, memory, and language. Her fusion of classical scholarship and literary invention has made her one of the most influential genre-defying writers of her generation.
Her major works include Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Glass, Irony and God (1992), Plainwater (1995), Autobiography of Red (1998), Economy of the Unlost (1999), Men in the Off Hours (2000), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), Decreation (2005), Nox (2010), Antigonick (2012), Red Doc> (2013), Float (2016), Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), and Wrong Norma (2024). She is also renowned for her translations and adaptations of Greek literature, including If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and works by Sophocles and Euripides.
The Beauty of the Husband won the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Carson has also received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her 2024 collection Wrong Norma was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
In 2026, Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
Carson’s work crosses conventional boundaries between poetry, fiction, essay, literary criticism, translation, drama, and visual art. Drawing extensively on Ancient Greek literature and philosophy, she frequently translates, reimagines, and places classical texts and figures in dialogue with modern life. Her writing combines scholarly erudition with formal experimentation and recurring concerns with love, desire, loss, beauty, grief, memory, and language. Her fusion of classical scholarship and literary invention has made her one of the most influential genre-defying writers of her generation.
Her major works include Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Glass, Irony and God (1992), Plainwater (1995), Autobiography of Red (1998), Economy of the Unlost (1999), Men in the Off Hours (2000), The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), Decreation (2005), Nox (2010), Antigonick (2012), Red Doc> (2013), Float (2016), Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019), and Wrong Norma (2024). She is also renowned for her translations and adaptations of Greek literature, including If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and works by Sophocles and Euripides.
The Beauty of the Husband won the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Carson has also received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her 2024 collection Wrong Norma was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
In 2026, Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
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