Sometimes I feel I spend my whole life rewriting the same page.

Cassandra Float Can, from Float, Anne Carson

Penelope does not raise an eyebrow. She knows her husband, she knows the economic system in which he is a player. Odysseus is a landowning, wifeowning, slaveowning aristocrat within a highly controlled aristocratic economy based on reciprocity and gift exchange. This is a society of noblemen who pass their wealth around to one another: mutual feasts, favors, gifts and hospitality serve to reify their own noble status. They take pains to distinguish this high-class wealth, which is honorable, from traders' gain or commercial profit, which is not. Aristocrats give and receive gifts, they do not buy and sell merchandise.

Contempts: A Study of Profit and Nonprofit in Homer, Moravia and Godard, from Float, Anne Carson

she calls
in tears tears fill up the phone

Powerless Structures Fig. II (Sanne) in Float, Anne Carson

25. Call room service at midnight ask for cornbread what do they suggest instead

From Maintenance, in Float, Anne Carson

...Whatever idea here rises from its knees
to turn and face you quicker than a kiss
or a hyphen or the very first moment you felt the breeze
of being a creature who will die — one day, not this --
will ask of you most of your cunning and a deep blue release like a sigh
while using only two pronouns, I and not-I.

Sonnet Isolate, in Possessive Used as Drink (Me): A Lecture on Pronouns in the Form of 15 Sonnets, from Float, Anne Carson