Literary Hub Casts Its Vote for Books by Anne Carson, Mary Ruefle

If you're still pulling together a bedside reading stack for the month of October, look no further than this hip and of-the-minute compendium by Literary Hub featuring 18 books that beg a glance, including poetry collections by Anne Carson and Mary Ruefle. Take a peak at Lit Hub's passages about Carson and Ruefle's books for a taste of the literary splendor ahead:

Float, Anne Carson (Knopf)

One of the many beauties of Anne Carson’s mind is how capacious she finds cracks in the edifice of language. Take a word, like eros, or a color—red—and Carson will turn that blunt object into a myth, a genealogy, even a song. No poet in the last century has leaned into words with such interrogative charm. For this reason she is not a writer for a reader who wants tidy stepping stones to epiphany. But if you are happy to slip your way somewhere unexpected Carson can be a cultish guide. In her career there have been books that pan back from Carson’s archaeological work as an essayist and translator and put on an exhibit of her concerns. Plainwater—which includes among its contents an imagined dialogue with a 7th-century poet, translations, and a dazzling essay on water—was one such book. Float, her latest, is another, and it’s extraordinary to see how the show has grown. Squeezed between a see-through box are twenty-some essays, poems, reviews of performances, riffs, and translations—it is like someone has drilled a hole into Anne Carson’s brain and now we can peek inside. Here is Carson resurrecting H.G. Wells’ long-suffering wife from obscurity, and Carson spreading a fan of sonnets across the page like tarot cards, and Carson basically demonstrating her absolute mastery of more forms than we knew existed.

–John Freeman (Executive editor at Lit Hub)

My Private Property, Mary Ruefle (Wave Books)

I love it when a poet can use her poet’s mind to redefine the essay form. That’s precisely what Mary Ruefle did with Madness, Rack, and Honey, one of the most memorable essay collections I have read in years, and also with The Most of It, an eclectic mixture of short prose pieces that had me thinking of Anne Carson. So I’m hugely looking forward to Ruefle’s next book of short prose, My Private Property, which promises to show me new ways to think and beautiful, profound combinations of words that I never would have imagined went together.

–Scott Esposito (Lit Hub contributor)

Read on at Literary Hub.