For two decades her work has moved–phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project–in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards, accolades, and an electric reputation in the literary world.
— Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine
Here in paperback is Anne Carson’s stunning translation of Sophokles’s luminous and disturbing tragedy, given entirely fresh language and new life
Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her seminal work. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author, “Dear Antigone.”
Canadian poet, essayist and translator of Greek mythology
For two decades her work has moved–phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project–in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards, accolades, and an electric reputation in the literary world.
— Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine
Anne Carson is a daring, learned, unsettling writer.
— Susan Sontag
[Antigonick] is both riveting and humorous. Bianca Stone’s illustrations are immediate and visceral, and Robert Currie’s overall book design has elegance and strength.
— The Globe & Mail [UK]
It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late.
— Judith Butler, Public Books
A beautiful, bewildering book, wondrous and a bit scary to behold, that gives a reader much to think about without making it clear how she should feel.
— Slate
Antigonick is as much a re-telling as it is a testament to the importance of Antigone in Western art, of re-tellings, and of refiguring narrative.
— Critical Mob
One of the best designed books of the year and a unique reading experience.
— Suicide Girls
Anne Carson’s is among the most inventive, astringent sensibilities in modern letters.
— George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement
This is where Carson’s work is best staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.
— New Statesman
Carson’s poetry convinces…irrepressibly modern and provoking.
— The Oxonian Review
It captures, too, the rift between our everyday efforts to keep ourselves busy, and infinite tragedy: that raw nick between Tuesday and death.
— The Guardian
Anne Carson’s blunt Antigonick has arrived at the right cultural moment, if not for poetry than for grief.
— The New Inquiry
Antigonick plays extensively with the conventions of narrative form, translation, and the physical presentation of literature.
— The Rumpus
Carson has perfectly captured Antigone’s moral fervour and her almost erotic desire for death.
— The Guardian
Ms. Carson does more than just update the language and quicken the pacing–she rewrites the play, mines its subtleties, its absurdity and its strangely comic timing and manages to produce a unique text out of a story that goes back much further than the fifth century B.C. when Sophokles wrote his version.