RaveThe Quarterly Literary Review SingaporeThe individual poems are not long, but it was the convergence of three ideas, each engaging with a different partner in each sentence with all the fluidity of dance, that provoked an uncertainty that perhaps the poet meant the book to be read through in one session ... The dedications contain the infidelities, and the book has to be danced to the end because it shapes up as a pathology of a crumbling marriage ... Carson has always been noted for her intellectual, perhaps academic, poetics, but The Beauty of the Husband is a tour de force, even by her standards. It astonishes not for the breadth and depth of classical and historical reference we have come to expect from her, but for her scintillating interweaving of mathematics and semiotics ... This book does not so much have the cool rigidity of a steel superstructure as the predatory passion of a tango.
