Classics scholar, poet, and all-around literary innovator Anne Carson, whose last book, Nox (New Directions, 2010), melded a long poem with photographs, fragments of letters, and other visual findings evoking the life of the author’s late brother, has broken out of the confines of text once again with a new, illustrated translation of the Antigone of Sophocles. Antigonick, released by New Directions in May, features
paintings by poet and artist Bianca Stone (whose other literary etchings can be viewed at www.poetrycomics.com) along with Carson’s own hand-lettered text. The book’s design, conceived by Robert Currie, Carson’s partner and frequent collaborator, sets the illustrations on translucent vellum paper, so each image reveals a trace of the words on the page it precedes. The image above overlays the lines, “seven gates / and in each gate a man / and in each man a death / at the seventh gate.” For a peek at other pages from the book, visit New Directions on Tumblr, www.tumblr.com/tagged/antigonick.
