Albert Einstein credited his discovery of fundamental laws of the universe to his ability to ask the simple questions. Much the same can be said of Anne Carson, who in her poetry and essays asks questions about gender, desire, anger, self, and language that allow the reader to see the world afresh. Her intent is not to push a narrative down a linear path but to plant a field with "instant[s] of nature" that gradually grow into a story present not only in the reader's consciousness, but in some preverbal consciousness as well. She points to a new direction for postmodernism, one that is unafraid of turning back to the discussion of the metaphysical, although not a metaphysics of the logo-centric variety--that is, a metaphysics with rationality at its center.

Carson sees her work as "an irritant." She questions the accepted convention of sophrosyne (self-control) at the...