The Beauty of the Husband

FROM ANNE CARSON, WINNER OF THE 2026 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE This “exquisite meditation on love and loss” (Elle) grapples with Keats’s idea that beauty is truth while telling the story of a marriage in twenty-nine “tangos”—which, like a marriage, must be danced to the end. “[An] eerie, elliptical, very beautiful elegy for a failed marriage . . . [Carson’s] verse pierces the mind with a laserlike light.”—The New York Times This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice—twenty-nine “tangos” of narrative verse that take us vividly through tender, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only Nobel Prize–winning poet Anne Carson could create a work that takes on the oldest of lyrical subjects—love—and make it this powerful, this fresh, this devastating.

ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.