... a personal, and deeply moving, meditation on the contours of absence. Nox is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible ... The details are affecting, but [Carson] doles them out sparingly. Nox shifts between the analytic and the lyrical. Even the lexicography turns out to be surprisingly complex and moving (dictionaries hardly being tearjerkers, as a rule) ... it’s quintessential Carson. Her work has always been an exercise in reinvigorating the clichés of autobiography by refracting them through her vast knowledge of classical literature and her deadpan, self-undermining wit ... Nox is a luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of an elegy, which is why it evokes so effectively the felt chaos and unreality of loss.

Nox is a brilliantly curated heap of scraps. It’s both an elegy and a meta-elegy, a touching portrait of a dead brother and a declaration of the impossibility of creating portraits of dead brothers ... In Nox, she treats her brother like a figure from antiquity who just happens to have grown up in the same houses she did and to have died 1,500-odd years after the fall of Rome ... Michael is both extremely specific and a kind of Everybrother ... As the accordion of Nox unfolds, its material begins to resonate across many levels. It is an elegy stuffed with elegies ... This strikes me as the secret ambition of Nox, to produce a worthy translation of Catullus 101—not merely on a line-by-line level...but in a deeper sense. Carson wants to reproduce, over the space of an entire book, the untranslatable qualities she most admires in Catullus: the passionate, slow surface; the deep festivity buried in the sorrow. She wants to reanimate dead things spoken in a dead language. 'A brother never ends,' she writes. 'I prowl him. He does not end.'

Carson...is an exceptionally daring and clever poet...and her British readership is much smaller than it should be. Although the look of Nox is very beguiling...it probably won't do much to change that. It's not exactly a companionable object. This is at once impressive, because the poem deserves the attention it demands, and a pity – because it's a deeply affecting piece of work, and everyone who has known grief will feel they can identify with at least some parts of it ... Nox is a brilliantly curated collection of fragments, which analyses and manifests the elusiveness that all human beings detect in one another, no matter how much they love them ... The deconstruction of 'Poem 101'...allows the construction of Nox. It gives it backbone, as well as a clear theme. This, like other elements of the structure, revolves around how much or how little it is possible to grasp of a person, which Carson interestingly equates with the question of translation itself ... Carson's ingenuities have breathed new energy into an ancient truth ... It's a very learned text. But it's also a very playful one, and a very moving one.

Nox has no page numbers, and it’s accordion-folded. It carries a whiff of visual art multiple or gift shop souvenir...But trust me: it’s an Anne Carson book. Maybe her best ... There’s not much poetry in this one, yet the whole thing is poetry of a kind you’re not used to. Her words are often not very melodious ... she’s analytical, pedagogical, privately plain-spoken, stonily amused. In Nox, the linkage of ideas approaches a kind of music; the language works only in their service, without much extra show ... Her memories are not straight nonfiction, but rather her usual: poems becoming dialogues, essays becoming memoir, single words becoming sentence fragments ... Every thought runs together in Nox. Elegy and history are cousins, [Carson] explains, because they’re both forms of autopsy ... The book is totally recherché and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed, precious in the word’s best sense.

Carson takes us into grief but also the process of computing it, while simultaneously allowing us to witness the impossible project of translating it from private to public experience ... The book, the thing that carries itself, is composed with a fierce sense for its materiality ... seething with life ... the role of argument and logic in Nox is to show how inadequate these devices are, but never to mock them, or our reliance on them; more importantly, Carson demonstrates and observes the way we persistently use what we can, what is available, to capture unspeakable, unattainable experience ... Carson’s voice is candid, uncompromising, full of furious calculation ... Nox is mystifying and exquisite, and, to reverse Carson’s metaphor, it opens doors that won’t close—even once you fold the book back into its box, you remain inside it.

...I don't think I've ever read — or ever held — anything like Anne Carson's Nox ... What saves Nox from being precious, from overdoing it, striking a pose that, while very moving, is finally ingenuine? Of course, a sister grieves for her brother — but she doesn't always create such a cathedral to her grief. And there's an irony to grief: It's one of life's most piercing things, yet it's not special ..Nox is saved by its painful, authentic uneasiness with itself. Again, the accordion-action of the book guarantees that we, as readers, stay off-balance as the pages pull in a couple of directions at once ... There is — as in much of Carson's poetry — a classical distance from shattering sorrow ... Nox looks and reads like memory ... True, this book — which you can read in less than an hour but will take a life to absorb — takes risks, gambles with exposure. It literally shows us family snapshots. Yet, it also suggests an austere but powerful hope, the kind you can't know unless you've been through loss like Carson's: Nox reminds us that where we cannot understand, we can still love.

Nox is no ordinary book of poetry: you can tell that much before you open it. The book comes in its own thick box, like a time capsule, or a receptacle for family photos...Opened, the box reveals not a bound codex but a long folded-up page, like a screen or a scroll: it feels not only hand-crafted but archaic, like a saint’s relic ... The aspects of Nox that stand out and lend themselves to memory are not by and large the words that Carson chooses, nor the order in which she puts them (many pages contain none). Instead they are visual, typographical, the material aspects of book design, images, collage ... With its insistence on the visual, the material, the tactile, the circumstantial, on everything and anything but its mere words, Nox thus becomes a book, or an anti-book, about the futility of language in the face of death ... Nox is the ghost of a book ... it is strange and affecting and hard to forget ... it is a moving document, a rapt exploration of a few more or less deconstructive ideas, a marvellous object of manufacture, a long trip through a short poem by Catullus, and a minor, memorable occurrence in the career of a major writer ... For many readers, and not a few editors, Nox and its ‘poetry of a kind you’re not used to’ has turned out to be poetry of the most welcome kind: a work you can admire and interpret simply by opening the box and unfolding the pages; a book of poems you don’t even have to read.

Nox, a grey, squat slab of a book – a book in a box, as self-enclosed as grief; a book so bulky it cannot be carried but must be visited – is [Michael's] headstone ... The single sheet of paper, folded accordion-style, that is Nox might be her most personal and accessible book to date – a surprising claim, perhaps, for a book that invites the reader to peer over the translator’s shoulder and has two complementary texts ... Just as every word of Catullus is painstakingly translated, as Carson pries open even the humblest preposition or utilitarian conjunction to reveal its associations, so too is the physicality of the book: the reproduction faithfully re-creates every staple’s shadow, every instance Carson’s pencil cuts into the page ... It’s reading at its most mimetic: Carson makes the reader participate in translating the poem – and in deciphering her elusive elder brother.

Depending on the critical camp, this could be considered the most exciting literary errata of the year or a glorified coffee-table book ... Despite its innovation in form and autobiographical context, Nox is classic Carson ... Carson's narrative goals have never been to relay memorable plot points, but to vividly convey how people feel during common human experiences, such as the loss of a sibling. Much of ancient literature is like this, narrowing in on one human experience and battering its protagonist with emotion until the character's only option is to wail in agony alongside the chorus ... Nox is a moving elegy on how difficult it is to fully understand and love your family. Its beautiful physical attributes make it a great gift for lovers of literature.

[Carson's] work embraces both fragments and loss ... All this sounds like quite a bulk of scholarship. But she isn’t a writer who wants to make reading difficult for us. Unlike with TS Eliot or Geoffrey Hill, one doesn’t sense that the agenda is to tell the reader, 'You find this difficult, don’t you? And that’s what’s wrong with society.' She explores her own feelings, and explains the words that respond to them. As a result, the reader can come away feeling these feelings, these fragments, this loss – they’re problems we all share. We learn to live with the bits that are fragmentary, dark or hard to work out. Now there are these fragments to keep her going; and now it’s the reader’s turn to make sense of his or her own loss.

Anne Carson’s Nox is a work of painful beauty. One long accordion-folded page housed in a box, it resembles an art book, but the stunning complexity of the accumulative poetic text makes it much more than merely aesthetically pleasing ... Carson suggests it is 'always comforting to assume there is a secret behind what torments you', and so she investigates a lexicography of words associated with grief that are set out like definitions, but push beyond literal meanings toward the creation of a more personal history 'told and retold.'

Less a book than an art object (though the distinction is dubious) ... Throughout Nox, the light switch is toggled on, and then off again—and 'translation' comes to indicate not just the endeavor to move from one expression to its contextual equivalent, but to separate the inseparable, to parse the influx of history into the present and the present back into history ... The materiality of Nox is impossible to sift from its poetry, from its function, which is primarily elegiac.

...what Carson does (and with furious precision) is impress upon us her grief over a life she cannot recapture—for Carson, this life is her brother's, for whom this collection is both an elegy and a history. What results is a work of astonishing candor, in which Carson manages to define the elegy anew by exploring the lacunae of her brother's life ... a physical record of a life in the form of a book that allows its fragments to carry her brother's absence. To call this art object extraordinary—more than a book, it's a reproduction of a scroll Carson made by hand—would be to understate. What Carson has given us is an act of devotion of such integrity that it carries its grief on its back.