Brick Books 50th Anniversary: Brilliant and Timeless Books to Take Another Look At—Short Talks

We’re delighted to continue our 50th anniversary series this month with Anne Carson’s Short Talks. This edition is part of our classics series published in celebration of our 40th anniversary a decade ago! This months blog post is written by Hao Nguyen.

Short Talks

by Hao Nguyen

Anne Carson’s Short Talks, a decade on, remains a residence, a weather station, a liminal space for observations. This edition, published in 2014, is introduced by Margaret Christakos with an insightful essay where she speaks to Carson’s work as in conversation with northern Ontario mining towns—slag heaps as a visual echo of Carson’s prose, where language itself seems to leach minerals, a poetics that accumulates as it pushes through and transforms materiality to express new forms. What continues to resonate for me in these prose blocks is Carson’s agility in the art of presentation, slipping with an in-between, what Carson brings of her mind-life expressed in small dynamic frames.

Perhaps part of the dynamism can be located within the gap made between the prose and their titles, ones that introduce their “talks” with an angularity or obliqueness, sharply. A title like “Short Talk on Walking Backwards” followed, for instance, by a passage on how the dead walk behind us “have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around.” The gap and sudden drop, a plunge into the unexpected. As a reader, I find myself inside degrees of interplay: what floats or falls in managing incident, image, and meaning. Tones of opacity, intimacies, and a place to take up form. Slag heap. Short talks. The poems are spondees of emphasis, of corresponding stresses. The prose is a tactile experience, an accumulation of texture. So wry, touching, and erudite.

First issued in 1992, this is Carson’s first and only collection of poems published with an independent Canadian press. It announced the arrival of a profound, elegiac, and biting new voice. Short Talks can comfortably stand alongside Carson’s other bestselling and award-winning works.

About Anne Carson

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 is now presented as a new edition in 2015 — Short Talks: Brick Books Classics 1.