Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize
"Wildly inventive. . . . Like a medieval-style storyteller, [Carson] creates new variations of accepted stories and mythic characters. . . . The rambling quality of [the] adventure evokes the scenes with gods and monsters in the ninth through 12th books of Homer's Odyssey. . . . Shockingly moving. . . . [The poetry] is strangely haunting in an understated way. It presents loss and our tenuous human interconnectedness in its fragile and mysterious passing. . . . An inspired creation."
—Globe and Mail
"Astonishing. . . . [Carson's] ambition is one thing; the fact that it is so completely achieved is, frankly, something else. . . . The best stories don't have beginnings or endings, not really, but they do have great tellers. Carson is, simply, one of the very best."
—The Guardian
"Breathtaking. . . . Personal, necessary, and important. . . . Read this book. You'll find it hard to forget."
—New York Times Book Review
"Carson's lyrical language effortlessly lifts pure moments of hope and despair off the page. . . . Red Doc> stands on its own—and takes the reader on a singular journey of longing and grief."
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Red Doc> is the sequel—sort of—to Autobiography of Red, one of the crossover classics of contemporary poetry. The book is strange and sweet and funny, and the remoteness of the ancient myth crossed with the familiarity of the modern setting creates a particularly Carsonian effect: the paradox of distant closeness.”
—New York Times Magazine
"Here is mythology, in all its weirdness, waking up in our bed . . . a chronological porousness [that] characterizes all of Carson's work. . . . For every line of Carson's that's grave and pensive, another is funny, erotic, demotic, or dirty. . . . Even when the setting gets surreal, Carson never breaks faith with ordinary emotion. Red Doc> is, at times, excruciating in its grief. Yet just when it threatens to become unbearable, just when you are hurling at terminal velocity toward the killing earth—just then everything that seemed broken comes together. Suddenly you are borne into the sky on words and stories, those human wings, up there with a thousand ice bats and a kind-hearted monster and a stoner cow and a solid column of volcanic smoke, seamed with brilliant flame."
—New York Magazine
"A supraliterary, textually experimental landscape that only Carson could conjure. Ranging from frozen tundra to festive meadows, G's odyssey features his dying mother, his war-veteran road-buddy lover, and a female artist friend in a wild hybrid narrative pushed to mythopoetic glory."
—Elle
"To read [Carson] is a challenge and a thrill. . . . Her writing is intensely cinematic. . . . A verbal acrobat and compulsive inventor. . . . She's a dramatist with an ear for domestic dialogue, and an eye for intimate detail. . . . It's huge fun just trying to keep up."
—Maclean's
"Unexpected, dizzying."
—Vogue
"The events in Red Doc>, not so much recounted as erupting, have an instability suggestive of Alice in Wonderland. . . . As with a roller coaster, the transitions make us look forward to the next splendid plunge. And we plunge."
—Boston Globe
"Red Doc> courses with a wit shot through with intelligence and humility. . . . Brushed with the magical, the absurd and the surreal."
—Paste
“If there is one book I’ve pressed on more people in the past decade, it is Carson's Autobiography of Red. . . . [The sequel,] Red Doc>, is insightful, whimsical, erotic and sad. . . . If you like books to provoke you, dare you, even change the way you think, let me recommend this strange, wonderful pair of novels about a young red man. We all have volcanoes in our lives. Sometimes it takes someone else to show us how to survive them.”
—NPR
"A shape-shifting verse novel that's both playful and compelling."
—Time Out
