One of Canada's best-kept literary secrets. Anne Carson is a professor of Classics at McGill University in Montreal, but that's just the day job. The rest of the time, she's one of the most shockingly lucid poets currently writing in the English language. Her poems are filled with sideways looks, shards of myth, and brittle sounds.

Books include:

• Short Talks -- her first collection, and still my favourite
• Autobiography of Red -- the Greek story of Herakles and Geryon becomes a pared-down pocket epic of love and the gaze.
• Plainwater -- pulls apart traditional form, interspersing poems with an invented dialog between herself and Mimnermos, a poet of the 7th century BC
• Men in the Off Hours -- Oedipus, Emily Dickinson and Audubon, among others, become mouthpieces for historical, poetic and conceptual slights of hand