SOURCE: Cooley, Nicole. Review of Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson. Review of Contemporary Fiction 18, no. 3 (fall 1998): 233-34.

In the following review, Cooley praises Carson for the emotional power and “masterful formal innovations” in Autobiography of Red.

Translator, poet, and professor of classics Anne Carson has written a work which challenges many long-held literary oppositions: prose vs. poetry, epic vs. lyric, ancient vs. modern. This text [Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse] retells the story of Geryon, a winged red monster, moving from his childhood to his love for and loss of the young boy Herakles. A parallel narrative follows the career of the ancient poet Stesichoros, original author of the myth. But the narrative appropriates myth only to reinvent it. Notably, the book begins with an epigraph from Gertrude Stein: “I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have...