Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do. A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

on the north coast of Sicily in a city called Himera, he lived among refugees who spoke a mixed dialect of Chalcidian and Doric. GERTRUDE STEIN He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet. exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday.' -The Village VoiceRED MEAT: WHAT DIFFERENCE DID STESICHOROS MAKE? I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do. sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender.' -The New York Times Book Review 'A deeply odd and immensely engaging book.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist 'Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today.' -Michael Ondaatje 'This book is amazing-I haven't discovered any writing in years so marvelously disturbing.' -Alice Munro 'A profound love story. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. The award-winning poet reinvents a genre in a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Herakles anne carson