The scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and errant: anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. This first monographic study of her work, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist makes the case for the acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator as a remarkable experimental scholar and reader, who rehearses scholarly methods while getting sure of their strictures of form and emotion. Carson’s attention to sources, ancient and modern, textual or visual, is one of few constants across almost four decades of her published writing, whose uncertain claims on discipline and genre are claimed here as a certain interpretive style.

The book follows Carson’s readings through variations in form -- from early academic prose and poem-essays to creative adaptations and works for performance -- to get to grips with what Coles calls Carson’s transparency: not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, working process, and intent. Carson’s portraits of mediation perform her interventions for us, yet they play compellingly with her commitments to cut mediation, argument, even authorship out of the picture: to poetic economy, constrained writing, chance, impersonation, imitation, and the performative. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and experimental form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now.