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Title: an overmarketed once-great writer flops
Review: And she flops BIG TIME. It's true--I think--that Carson is very likely a genius. Her debut, as far as literature is concerned, was about as great a collection as any published that year: Plainwater. But here, in her fourth collection, the follow-up to the woefully over-hyped "Autobiography of Red," Carson is struggling to "make" poetry--out of appropriated texts, out of nonsense, out of little precious epigramatical sayings. . .it's a hodge-podge that makes little sense as a collection, and whose individual poems make even less of an impression.If I have my math right, Carson has averaged about a book every other years since the mid-nineties. I think she needs to take a break. I think she needs an editor. I think she needs to stop paying attention to the folks who so eagerly want to claim her as the late twentieth-century's answer to the American tendency to love the unknown writer late discovered in his or her life, a la Dickinson, Clampitt, etc.
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