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

Alive and Thriving for 50 Years

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

Founded in 1975 by poets Don McKay and Stan Dragland, Brick Books is marking its 50^th anniversary in 2025. Keeping a poetry-only small press not only alive but thriving for fifty years in a capitalist culture is an unlikely feat, and we’re in the mood to celebrate. One of the ways we’ll be celebrating throughout the year is by publishing a series of blogposts by Canadian poets reflecting on titles from our backlist—brilliant and timeless books we’d love readers to take another look at.

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.

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