SOURCE: Phillips, Adam. “Fickle Contracts: The Poetry of Anne Carson.” Raritan 16, no. 2 (fall 1996): 112-19.

In the following review, Phillips applauds Plainwater and Glass, Irony and God as ambitious and exhilarating collections, noting that Carson's influences include Greek mythology, psychoanalysis, and the modernist writings of Gertrude Stein.

When an interviewer for the Village Voice asked Anne Carson how often she wrote—not always the most interesting question—Carson also told him where she wrote: “anywhere all the time in the margins of anything to hand. Everyday yes regardless.” If “yes” here is a moment's hesitation in her Beckettian sentence, the sense is that almost nothing stops her. Writing in the margins, whether that entails squeezing oneself in, or randomly expanding a text, shows a certain regard for boundaries and for bodies—if only of words—the twin preoccupations of all Carson's writing and about which she is unfailingly interesting...