SOURCE: Wronsky, Gail. Review of Glass, Irony and God, by Anne Carson. Antioch Review 55, no. 2 (spring 1997): 247.

In the following review, Wronsky examines Carson's treatment of the relationship between gender and language in Glass, Irony and God, labelling the collection as “one of the most daring and significant and original books to appear in decades.”

When Carson's poem “The Glass Essay,” the first of five dazzling poetic sequences in this book [Glass, Irony and God], first appeared in Raritan Review, my network of radical women readers and I (“women who read with the wolves,” we call ourselves, wild with irony) went crazy. There are only a few of us—a philosopher, a fiction writer, a couple of poets, an administrator, a former Ike-ette—but we trust each other's reading abilities and nobody else's. For years we've been waiting for someone to publish work like this. And the occasion, it...