Full of Knives

1. His back is full of knives. Notes are brittle around the blades.

2. He sleeps face down every night in a chalk outline of himself.

3. He has difficulties with metal detectors.

4. At birthday parties, someone might politely ask, may I borrow one of those knives to slice this chocolate cake?

5. He likes to stand with his back to walls. At restaurants, he likes the corner tables.

6. There is a detective that calls him to ask about the brittle notes. Also: a biographer, a woman who'd like to film a documentary, a curator of a museum, his mother. I can't read them, he says. They're on my back.

7. It would be a mistake for anyone to assume he wants the knives removed.

8. Most of the brittle notes are illegible. One of them, even, is written in French.

9. Every Halloween, he goes as a victim of a brutal stabbing. Once, he tried going as a whale, but it was a hassle explaining away the knives.

10. He always wears the same bloody suit.

11. When he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on.

12. It is ok for children to count on his knives, but not to climb on them.

13. He saw his own shadow in a park. He moved his body to make the knives reach other people's shadows. He did it all evening. In the shadows, his knives looked like soft outstretched arms.

14. His back is running out of space.

15. On a trip to Paris, he fell in love and ended up staying for a few years. He got a job performing on the street with the country's best mimes.

16. The knives are what hold him together. It is the notes that are slowly killing him.

17. He is difficult to hold when he cries.

18. He will be very old when he dies and the Doctor will say, he was obviously stabbed, brutally and repeatedly. I'm sorry, the Doctor will say to a person in the room, but he's not going to make it.

by Zachary Schomburg. Feel free to go out and buy The Man Suit immediately.

An Anne Carson Tool

I've here compiled all the work of Anne Carson I could find online. This list is alphabetical. I've tried not to include excerpts from long poems, just full texts. The compilation is ongoing, and as yet not comprehensive. I've tried to choose formatting true to the original publication whenever possible and sites whose templates I find inoffensive.

Apostle Town 
Beckett's Theory of Tragedy
Beckett's Theory of Comedy
Bride Town
By Chance the Cycladic People
By God
Deflect (Flexion of God)
Detail from the Tomb of the Diver
Epithalamium NYC
Father's Old Blue Cardigan
Flexion of God (Deflect)
Fragment 1, Sappho "Hymn to Aphrodite"
Fragment 31 (Sappho)
Fragment 31 (Sappho) (page facing bi-lingual with Greek)
Fragment 44Aa (Sappho)
A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways
Fragment by Sophokles
The Gender of Sound
The Glass Essay
God's Christ Theory
The God Coup
The God Fit
God's Handiwork
God's Justice
God's List of Liquids
God's Name
God's Work
Guillermo’s Sigh Symphony
Gnosticism I
Gnosticism II
Gnosticism III
Gnosticism IV
Gnosticism V
Gnosticism VI
Her Beckett
Lines
Love Town
Me Thinks that Poor Town Has Been Troubled for too Long
My Religion
New Rule
No Port Now
Nothing For It
Ode to Sleep
Our Fourtune
Poem of Jealousy (Sappho) (with 29 other translations)
Quad
Short Talks (Introduction)
Short Talk on Brigitte Bardot
Short Talk on Charlotte
Short Talk on Chromo-luminarism 
Short Talk on Defloration
Short Talk on Disappointments in Music
Short Talk on the End
Short Talk on Geisha
Short Talk on Gertrude Stein About 9.30
Short Talk on Hedonism
Short Talk on His Draughtmanship
Short Talk on Hölderlin's World Night Wound
Short Talk on Homo Sapiens
Short Talk on Hopes
Short Talk on Housing
Short Talk on the King and His Courage
Short Talk on Le Bonheur D'Etre Bien Aimee
Short Talk on Longing
Short Talk on Major and Minor
Short Talk on the Mona Lisa
Short Talk on My Father
Short Talk on Orchids
Short Talk on Our Debt to the Memory of the Dead
Short Talk on Ovid
Short Talk on Parmenides
Short Talk on Penal Servitude
Short Talk on Rain
Short Talk on Reading
Short Talk on Rectification
Short Talk on the Rules of Perspective
Short Talk on the Sensation of an Airplane Taking Off
Short Talk on Shelter
Short Talk on Sleep Stones
Short Talk on Sunday Dinner with Father
Short Talk on Sylvia Plath
Short Talk on the Total Collection
Short Talk on The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman
Short Talk on Trout
Short Talk on the Truth to Be Had from Dreams
Short Talk on Van Gogh
A Short Talk on Vicuñas
Short Talk on Walking Backwards
Short Talk on Waterproofing
Short Talk on Where to Travel
Short Talk on Who You Are
Short Talk on the Youth at Night
Sleepchains
Some Afternoons She Does Not Pick Up the Phone
Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions
Sunday
Teresa of God
That Strength
Town of Finding Out About the Love of God
Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking
Town of Spring Once Again
Town on the Way through God's Woods
TV Men: Lazarus
TV Men: Sappho
TV Men: The Sleeper
Why Angry Is
Wildly Constant
Would Be Her 50th Wedding Anniversary Today

Poems I’m going to write and submit to Fence by Lindsey Baggette

Poem that I spilled a soda on but can still kind of read

Poem that isn’t just about porn but is porn

Shall I compare thee to a summative datum?

How to communicate diseases through a public pool

On the Phenomenology of Self: My Colon and its Relevance to Global Politics

I love you here is a gold star

Collage of words obscured by chocolate fingerprints in my copy of Aristotle’s Poetics

Excerpts from your secret diary that is now mine

Census on the tropical Pokemon of Japan

Hamburger insides poem

between two expansive poems

Poem delineating multiple dimensions of time that exists in a dimension we can’t perceive

Dissertation on American imperial brutality as sung by Jewel

This poem is reading your thoughts but it approves

Lullabies for your kidney stone

Poem about beach sex with sand glued over all of the dirty words

I am a better writer than Shakespeare

Poem about being in a helicopter, which goes in a couple of circles and then vomits on itself

Grandma called to say the elevator doesn’t smell bad anymore

Do not make paper birds out of this; I want it back