The Beauty of the Husband

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats’s idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.

This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice–29 “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects–love–and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

“"An exquisite meditation on love and loss that reads with the emotional depthand with the ongoing resonanceof a great novel."Elle "[An] eerie, elliptical, very beautiful elegy for a failed marriage.... Her verse pierces the mind with a laserlike light."The New York Times "Her best book.... Her poetry's form and sensibility are quite unlike anything else."The Globe & Mail(Toronto)”

“An exquisite meditation on love and loss that reads with the emotional depth–and with the ongoing resonance–of a great novel.”–Elle

“[An] eerie, elliptical, very beautiful elegy for a failed marriage.... Her verse pierces the mind with a laserlike light.”–The New York Times

“Her best book.... Her poetry’s form and sensibility are quite unlike anything else.”–The Globe & Mail (Toronto)

ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

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