The scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and errant: anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. The first monographic study of her work to date, 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 slipping their constraints 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 poems, essays to creative adaptations, and works for performance -- to come to grips with what Coles calls Carson's transparency: not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, process, and
