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April Announcement (and a book)
The 15th Anniversary (!) of Open Books: A Poem Emporium is Wednesday, April 28, 2010
We’ll celebrate this happy occasion by donating a minimum of 15% of the week's sales, splitting it between the Seattle Public Library and the King County Library System. We're pleased, and a touch surprised, to have been around this long. Thank you for buying your poetry books from Open Books. Happy Anniversary to us all!
And now, one of but many new titles on the shelves...
Nox by Anne Carson ($29.95 New Directions)
What is Nox? Poet, classicist, essayist Carson writes, "When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get." Nox is both book and piece of art (an unbound, accordion-fold text encased in a box). It is scholarly study (her meticulously rendered translation of a poem by Catullus) and memoir (a spare, haunting recollection of her estranged, and now dead, brother, including photographs, stamps, fragments of a letter). Both an examination of the concept of the historian (a role first granted Herodotus, she tells us) and a moving elegy. In other words, an original work from an ever original thinker and writer. To view it, to read it, is an act of touching intimacy, of shared human experience --
"I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he's dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history. So I began to think about history."
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