Book Review: “Men in the Off Hours” by Anne Carson

Towards the end of winter break I had the privilege of reading Anne Carson’s book “Men in the Off Hours.” Published in 2000, Carson’s book is full of poetry and creative nonfiction essays that mesh together people, place and time in an unexpected and historically impossible way. It’s a delight for anyone interested in anything — literature, history, philosophy, feminism and the art of writing in general.

“Men in the Off Hours” covers so much ground throughout its 167 pages that it feels wrong (not to mention insanely difficult) to try to discuss all of it in one short article. Instead, I’ll focus on certain pieces that are staying with me even after finishing the book a couple of weeks ago. The first of these is titled “Sumptuous Destitution,” a piece that reads similar to a poem, with interjections taken from letters between renowned poet Emily Dickinson and her longtime mentor Thomas Higginson.

Carson uses quotes from Dickinson’s and Higginson’s letters to form the skeleton of her poem. If you’re thinking, “wow, that’s meta,” it gets even more so. Not only is Carson quoting a poet in her own poem, she (or her poetic speaker) is having what seems to be a dialogue with Dickinson and Higginson, while they themselves are having a conversation through the letters. It’s worth noting that the letters Carson chooses are not necessarily from the same conversation; in fact, they most certainly are not. Nonetheless, the layers are worth sifting through.

Something that seems to be particularly important to Carson in this book is the idea of series or repetitions. She has multiple poems titled “TV Men,” or some variation thereof. She even has a couple of pieces that have “draft” in the title, whether or not they seem like actual drafts of each other. Moreover, as the back cover states, she creates situations that include “Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, [and] Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine.”

There is also a theme of death and mourning in Carson’s writing. This is made clearest in the final essay of the book, “Appendix to Ordinary Time.” Carson shares the recent death of her mother, discussing pieces from her mother’s diaries, including entries regarding her processing her own father’s death. In what reads like the most intimate essay of all, Carson brings us out of the intellectual framework she’s set up into the things that unite us all: love and the inevitability of death.

As I mentioned before, “Men in the Off Hours” is full of life, full of what I think the idiom “food for thought” must have been created to describe. There is so much in every sentence and every line, let alone on every page and in every piece. It’s an exploration of genre and form, of academia and art, completed by the thread of gender running through it all.

I’d highly recommend checking the library for this book or getting your hands on it some other way. It is well worth a read or even a skim between classes and meetings. What are you waiting for? Give into your liberal artsy self and start reading!