Poetry. In Anne Carson's SHORT TALKS the reader is bombarded with short prose poems that resound with the fullness of meditations on life: lyric sermons, riddle-poems that consist only of answers, Lou Reed meets Claude Monet and converts to Zen, the pure hilarious ache of ontology. SHORT TALKS, the first book-length collection by this accomplished, original voice, is elegiac, perceptive, and droll. Sunday mornings are never going to be the same again. "The voice is laconic and composed but its images come off these pages resonant (more than resonant, shaking) with their own newness" -Don Coles.