SOURCE: Rasula, Jed. “A Gift of Prophecy.” Canadian Literature, nos. 161-162 (summer-autumn 1999): 187-89.

In the following review, Rasula praises Carson for her imagination, originality of form, and effective use of irony in Autobiography of Red.

Subtitled “A Novel in Verse,” this book [Autobiography of Red] recalls in its form the maverick legacy of the novel as “total poetic genre” as envisioned by the German Romantics. Historically, the novel is a genre arising in the seams between other genres, accenting the faultlines within and between them: a genre born to contest other genres. Because most novels forego this legacy, it has lately become a fetching prospect for poets (Lyn Hejinian's Oxata, for example). In the Canadian context, there is a rich precedence for the book-as-concept in the work of Nichol, McCaffery, Dewdney, and Bök, to name a few. Autobiography of Red is more than a narrative of a...