Like all good Michigan honor students, I had a thorough grounding in Classics, very little of which I actually remember. But more importantly, I shared a department, albeit briefly, with Anne Carson, poet/novelist/translator/Classics prof. at the University of Michigan, which has drawn me to her translations over anyone else's, including all those I got to know in college. I was really delighted to find her new translation of Sappho's fragments, something I read as a freshman but never really took the time to enjoy.

There is an inherent flaw to reading them now -- they were intended as recitations, not written poems, first of all, and they exist in very small fragments, which means we're only able to read a tiny portion of Sappho's work. All the same, there is such an obvious elegance to what remains that despite something getting lost in translation, it still yields such riches. I think this is quite possibly the most rewarding volume of poetry I've read this year, and serves as a reminder of why I set out to read more in the first place

Autobiography of Red

By Anne Carson

My "To Be Read" list is very long, and normally my reading habits follow a structure. I've got my next several books already queued up next to my bed, easily enough literature to last into October. I'm a pretty serious book buyer, and typically I let my books marinade on my shelves for a few weeks/months before I finally get around to reading them. However, there is always that occasional book that grabs my attention and demands to be read immediately after purchase, and The Autobiography of Red is one of those rare specimens. It's certainly helped by the fact that it is so very short, so very unique and intriguing, and that it was recommended by someone over at Insatiable Booksluts.

To call it a novella would be to ignore its poetic language, and to call it a poem would be to ignore its novel-like narrative structure and character development. It lands in this really magical middle ground, more like epic poetry, but without the negative associations most of us probably have of reading Homer in college. It is a pseudo-retelling/modernization of the Greek myth about Geryon, a monster whose killing was one of the labors of Heracles, but in Anne Carson's version Geryon is not a monster per se, but a young man struggling with is sexuality and identity.

There's a hefty dose of magical realism and some will probably be frustrated by the prose, but I would advice you to just power through, because although it starts out with a confusing framing device, everything becomes clearer as you delve into the Geryon narrative.