A Year in Reading: Terry Nguyen
Winter
Anne Carson, to me, is a winter poet. There is a wintry solemnity even to her most romantic works; the speaker is held at a remove, stilted (or perhaps jilted) by their desires. I began my year with Decreation, and devoted the rest of January to reading whatever the Brooklyn Public Library had of Carson’s oeuvre: Beauty of the Husband; Glass, Irony and God; and Autobiography of Red (which I ended up buying because the waitlist was several months long). It was a lot of poetry, but I never tired of Carson’s ability to induce emotional devastation in a single line: “Her voice sounded broken into. Where were you last night.” (Beauty of the Husband)
