Megahn O'Rourke on Anne Carson's "Nox"

Anne Carson (Photo by Einar Falur Ingólfsson)

Congratulations to Anne Carson for winning the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature. She’s been contributing to The New Yorker since 1997. See, for example, “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan” (November 10, 1997), “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” (December 3, 2001), “Short Talk on Herbology” (April 22, 2013), “Clive Song” (August 7 & 14, 2017), “Life” (June 28, 2021), “What Happened to New York” (May 5, 2025). I confess I’m not a fan. I find her too metaphysical. That’s my problem, not hers. I’ll have to give her a second look.

Carson is the subject of one of The New Yorker’s best poetry reviews – Megahn O’Rourke’s “The Unfolding” (July 12 & 19, 2000). It’s a review of Carson’s Nox. O’Rourke describes it as follows:

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.

That is a brilliant description! I’ve never forgotten it. 

O’Rourke wrote one of my favorite poems – “My Aunts” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009). Here it is:

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the nineteen-seventies.
Always making margaritas in the kitchen,
always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,
sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;
always splitting the bills to the last penny,
stealing each other’s clothes,
loving one another then complaining
as they walked out the door. Each one with her doe eyes,
each one younger than the last,
each older the next year, one year
further from their girlhoods of swimming
at Sandy Hook, doing jackknives off the diving board
after school, all of them
being loved by one boy and then another,
all driving further from the local fair, further from Atlantic City.
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stoplights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.

That “doing jackknives off the diving board after school” is inspired! The whole poem is inspired! It has the breath of life.