Buy the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million | Indiebound | Powell’s | Google Play | Kindle | Nook | iBookstore | Other Retailers
“Rarely do books of poetry get sequels, but the big collection of 2013 is sure to be Anne Carson’s follow-up to her now-legendary Autobiography of Red […] She is justly famous and beloved, and her many fans are always clamoring for more. This book, especially, will set them on fire.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
A literary event: a follow-up to the internationally acclaimed poetry best seller Autobiography of Red (“Amazing” –Alice Munro) that takes its mythic boy-hero into the twenty-first century to tell a story all its own of love, loss, and the power of memory.
In a stunningly original mix of poetry, drama, and narrative, Anne Carson brings the red-winged Geryon from Autobiography of Red, now called “G,” into manhood, and through the complex labyrinths of the modern age. We join him as he travels with his friend and lover “Sad” (short for Sad But Great), a war veteran; and with Ida, an artist, across a geography that ranges from plains of glacial ice to idyllic green pastures; from a psychiatric clinic to the somber house where G’s mother must face her death. Haunted by Proust, juxtaposing the hunger for flight with the longing for family and home, this deeply powerful verse picaresque invites readers on an extraordinary journey of intellect, imagination, and soul.
Praise for Red Doc>:
“Likely to be one of the biggest poetry books of the year . . . [In] this continuation of/sequel to Carson’s legendary verse-novel Autobiography of Red . . . Geryon is now simply ‘G,’ and our little boy-demon is forced to navigate the modern world with Sad, his lover. We’re willing to leave all our myths in Carson’s hands.” —Emily Temple, Flavorwire
“In Red Doc>, Carson’s follow-up to her daring Autobiography of Red, the boy-to-man hero, G, journeys through a supraliterary, textually experimental landscape that only Carson could conjure. Ranging from frozen tundra to festive meadows, G’s odyssey features his dying mother, his war-veteran road-buddy lover, and a female artist friend in a wild hybrid narrative pushed to mythopoetic glory.” —Lisa Shea, Elle
“Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, a book by one of the best-known poets of our century is a bildungsroman. But it is also a love story, a meditation on translation, a portrait of the artist as a young monster: very strange, very smart, intermittently funny, and ridiculously beautiful. It is the one book I would take with me to a desert island. Carson’s new book, Red Doc>, a sequel of sorts of Autobiography of Red, is sadder than its predecessor, and stranger, too.. . . [Scenes] read like the moments of awe life occasionally grants us long after we have lost our innocence—respite from the difficult, disillusioning, everyday ticktock of being human. Even when the setting gets surreal, Carson never breaks faith with ordinary emotion. Red Doc> is, at times, excruciating in its grief. Yet just when it threatens to become unbearable, just when you are hurling at terminal velocity toward the killing earth—just then everything that seemed broken comes together. Suddenly you are borne into the sky on words and stories, those human wings, up there with a thousand ice bats and a kind-hearted monster and a stoner cow and a solid column of volcanic smoke, seamed with brilliant flame.” —Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.