Staff Reviews
Antigone's mother is also her grandmother, her brothers have killed one another, and today, her dogmatic uncle is entombing her alive, but Carson won't let Oedipus' daughter mope about with a frowny face, oh no. This heretic, gutteral translation of Sophocles provides us with the strongest Antigone I've ever encountered, one whose humor makes her both more and less human.
— Matt
Description
An illustrated new translation of Sophokles’ Antigone.
Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides.
Antigonick is her seminal work. Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author, “Dear Antigone.”
Praise For…
Carson is nothing less than brilliant—unfalteringly sharp indiction, audacious, and judicious in taking liberties.
— Publishers Weekly
Reading Anne Carson is to experience aeuphonious, mystical sort of perplexity.
— Richard Bernstein - The New York Times
She reaches past the contemporary moment to craft her unique and
universal voice, one that is both as ancient as Sappho and
intimidatingly modern.
— Washington Square News
People who don’t read poetry read Anne Carson.
— Deborah Landau
She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.
— Susan Sontag
It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late.
— Judith Butler - Public Books
Her poetry is light, swift, and beautiful.
— The New Yorker
The reader, the listener is provoked and challenged to the utmost.
— The Times Literary Supplement
A beautiful, bewildering book, wondrous and a bit scary to behold, that gives a reader much to think about without making it clear how she should feel.
— Slate
Ms. Carson does more than just update the language and quicken the pacing–she rewrites the play, mines its subtleties, its absurdity and its strangely comic timing and manages to produce a unique text out of a story that goes back much further than the fifth century when Sophocles wrote his version.
— The Guardian
Carson's poetry convinces. Carson's work is irrepressibly modern and provoking.
— The Oxonian Review
Stone's illustrations and the hand-lettered text make
Antigonick a beautiful object.
— livemint.com & The Wall Street Journal
Antigonick is as much a re-telling as it is a testament to the importance of
Antigone in Western art, of re-tellings, and of refiguring narrative.
— Critical Mob
Her poetry is expressionistic (you see this in
Antigonick), shot through with a spiritual turbulence and an almost violent sensitivity to experience, and the barbed edges of her lines can send shocks through you.
— Full Stop
In Carson's hands, this small, familiar Greek volume takes on a thunderously fresh rhythm, a satisfying blend of poetry and prose.
— KGB Bar Lit Magazine
Her poetry at it's best, like Antigone's character, is a thrilling combination of hot-blooded instinct and dispassionate resolve.
— National Post
The experiment's a fascinating one, and this interesting, risk-taking book is unignorable.
— The Independent
Antigonick plays extensively with the conventions of narrative form, translation, and the physical presentation of literature.
— The Rumpus
This is where Carson's best work is staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.
— New Statesman
Antigonick has arrived at the right cultural moment.
— The New Inquiry
Carson's
Antigonick is wildly unorthodox. But it's also captivating, in a brash, pop culture-inflected way.
— Thestar.com
