Red Doc> details the aftermath of an unspoken past. Loosely, it is a sequel to Carson’s 1998 verse novel Autobiography of Red—a continued re-imagining of the Greek myth of Geryon and Herakles.
A chorus sets the stage. Piled into one car: G, Sad, Ida embark on a dayless journey into a blue-white glacier, searching for a rehabilitation facility, a Promethean dramaturg, a psychically paralyzed oracle, and G’s dying mother. Somewhere in their future, a brewing volcano looms. Woven into the genre-bending narrative are hesitations, overcorrections, incoherences, and misheard or misinterpreted words which gradually reveal the characters’ invisible histories. These jarring displacements of language and structure, replicated in the poem below, provide the reader with the echoes and shadows of a love that once existed unmutated. This book says, but does not ask, what now /
/ this is a sequel or
a retelling of a retelling
scene is
driving towards volcano (again)
time is
dead of
NIGHT laying in bed is the only time he’ll talk about it. Talk to your mom you mean. Yeah. Outside raining ceaseless into deep morning fog. The wet patio glistening as an oil painting. Coral shaped ashtray brimming over filters bleached like little bone white ships floating upwards on the tide. Rainsoaked clothes strewn. Miniature ponds in the earth blinking forming pockets of gentle. Are you still cold. A little. He does not know to ask about Paris then again what is there. To say no one stayed behind not even you. Inside heater running on HI come here your socks are on his floor. Shifting in the membrane of what did you say. Nothing. Like a father reticent. When’s your flight. Soon but not yet come here he says finally again. And so. Shared goosebumps recede against heat fumbling I want to. Soon but. A night that so easily could’ve not existed slotted between fixtures of habit resolution solitude skin. Stretched tight like a hungry drum keeping pace with soon but not yet a sleek white engine will move enormous upwards across the San Francisco Bay and memory will become cross-stitched dismembered like a sinusoidal tongue. Like a hypothermic man dying stripping scampering naked into the glacial landscape (come here). No present moment not saturated by raw data from the future from the unspoken past. Instead like a liar you say. I should get going don’t want you to miss your flight. You put your socks back on.
title is
learning to impede the movement
moral is
to live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
Red Doc> can be purchased here.
Berkeley Fiction Review 
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