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Throughout her prolific career as a poet and a translator, Anne Carson has been concerned with combatting what she calls ‘the boredom of storytelling’ As she explained to Michael Silverblatt on stage at an event last year, ‘When your thinking is still, watching TV or whatever, thinking the same thing you’ve always thought, you might as well be dead… Living happens when your thought moves’ To read Carson is to feel the parameters of poetry, translation and story-making move and unsettle Or, to borrow a phrase of Carson’s, to watch someone ‘undo the latches’ of ordinary understanding   Born in Canada in 1950, Carson has created one of the most exciting bodies of work in contemporary poetry Since the publication of her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, in 1986, Carson’s output has varied in form (translations, a novel in verse, lyric lectures, short talks, fragments, a fictional essay in twenty-nine tangos) and format (chapbooks, pamphlets, paperbacks, boxes) In more recent years, Carson has collaborated with artists, and staged elaborate performances of her work These can include dancers, or sound art, or video, or sometimes all three   Carson’s work is characterised by an ability to break open form, to question it, and to see beyond it, even as she uses it In the pieces she calls ‘Lyric Lectures’, Carson delivers texts informed by deep academic research but enlivened by poetic experiment Her ‘Short Talks’ are short stories without the story (‘On Gertrude Stein’ about 9:30: ‘How curious I had no idea! Today has ended’) In Autobiography of Red, her translation of a long lyric poem by Stesichorus, its two mythic figures Geryon and Herakles are cast as gay teenagers living in modern America Its sequel, Red Doc>, in which place, character and form have been reshuffled, was a radical challenge to the definition of a sequel Her newest publication Float is a book that has been freed from order and sequence: a clear box which must be knocked open to release 22 chapbooks   While Carson is best known for her studies of ancient Greek, a subject she has taught for many years – she has translated many of the major Greek texts, including