Anne Carson’s Nox: Materiality and memory

This article focuses on Anne Carson’s Nox, a boxed book published in 2010. What makes it special is the physicality of its format as well as its multi-layered and polymorphous text that due to its fold-out construction invites readers to investigate the missing words and phrases, or the spaces left between its pasted documents so as to confront the experiences narrated and shared through them. This article discusses how Nox’s design allows an examination of the means by which stories can be told and traumatic events can be treated. In this way, the physicality of Carson’s Nox both preserves and enhances the memory of the personal experience it attempts to communicate, due to the various spatial arrangements it proposes of its verbal and visual materials.