Nox form=Nox function

Before it can be deciphered, Nox—Anne Carson's elegy to a brother lost to her long before his actual death—must be unraveled. Nox comes in the form of "a long sheet of paper folded up like an accordion," and that it opens wide only to collapse in on itself again is no accident, suggests former Poetry Foundation journalism fellow and current Poetry magazine contributor Abigail Deutsch in an intricate critique for literature review Open Letters Monthly:

The oddness of Nox’s physical form prevents us from reading it casually. We must choose how to read it, how to hold it, how to sit with it—and those challenges, in turn, warn about the way Nox will sit with us. It will test and puzzle; it will make demands on us, and make us self-conscious of our responses.

The text's unconventional form is a visual manifestation of the cryptic quotes, oblique references and bits of translation that comprise this hodgepodge "scrapbook" elegy:

For Carson, quoting becomes a kind of translation, prone to translation’s troubles and freedoms. She begins the work with the Latin original of Catullus’s 101st poem, an address to the Roman poet’s own late brother. Each left-hand page of Nox provides substantial English explication for a word of the Catullus poem, which Carson progresses through from start to finish. This assiduous translation seemingly aims to clarify. Yet every Latin word spawns a vast lineage of English equivalents, some more related to Catullus than others. Eventually Carson’s own themes—night, loss, darkness—come to infuse the definitions. The plenitude of information obscures his poem—to quote her definition of “multas,” it is “too much in evidence, tedious, wearisome, verbose; occurring in a high degree, full, intense.”

Though the references are intriguing, Deutsch fins that the elegiacal emotions are diluted by Carson's "intellectual acrobatics." Yet perhaps Carson could only access her long-absent brother through uneasy circumlocutions:

Carson’s experience may demand such mechanisms; Nox may be her way of packaging the intensity and perplexity of losing her brother—crafting, out of uncontainable grief, an artifact small and neat enough to hold. She writes that when you have survived something “you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.” Surviving means carrying on, quite literally—means boxing up, holding fast, and going forward.