News at Eleven: [Mark] Edmundson dismisses Anne Carson, too,

as "opaque" and "inscrutable"--the same Anne Carson who became a hit when her compulsively readable, gay coming-of-age "novel in verse" Autobiography of Red was name-dropped on Sex and the City. When Edmundson asserts that "no well-known poet" writes about big subjects like sex, he ignores the entirety of Carson's work. Take just one example from her collection Plainwater: "Men know almost nothing about desire/they think it has to do with sexual activity/or can be discharged that way./But sex is a substitute, like money or language."

As a woman, though, does Carson count?

from The Atlantic Monthly: Literature Is Dead (According to Straight, White Guys, At Least)

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