New Directions first published Anne Carson in 1995, a few years after I joined the staff. James Laughlin had read her in American Poetry Review and wrote us a memo saying “In the current issue, I ran across something charming —this lady classics prof at McGill who has fantasies about God.” A few months later, I sent JL, as we called him, my annual “copyright report” in which I updated him on all the copyrights I’d renewed and registered with the Library of Congress that year, and he wrote me an encouraging letter back saying “I may have a book for you to work on, it’s by Anne Carson who writes like no other.”

That book was Glass, Irony & God and became one of ND’s most popular and bestselling books of poetry since Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. In a big 2000 New York Times Magazine piece, Melanie Rehak wrote: “Carson accepts ancient and modern influences equally.” Anne Caron’s work perfectly fits in our long history of publishing some of America’s greatest avant-garde poets—Robert Creeley, H.D., Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, George Oppen, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Paul Zukofsky.

The book, graced on the cover with one of Anne’s volcano paintings and containing some of her finest work including “The Glass Essay” and “TV Men,” is a laurel on the New Directions list.

Though we didn’t have another book together, Anne Carson and I stayed friends and a few years ago she contributed a great introduction to our edition of the Danish poet Inger Christensen’s magnum opus it. I always held out hopes we could publish something else by her, and then last fall, Anne wrote saying, “Let’s meet for coffee, I think I may have a project for ND,” and so she arrived with “her current collaborator and gentleman friend” Robert Currie.

What they brought with them looked at first like a worn, hardcover book. Inspecting more closely, I saw it was a handmade art object containing poems Anne had typed on a computer, printed out and pasted on the pages. There were sketches in color and black and white, family photos, torn pages of family letters, quotes from Herodotus, what looked like stencils done in charcoal, a negative, a 3-D plastic sculpture, torn pages from Latin texts. It reminded me of a scrapbook, and it was exquisite to look at. Rather than a random collage though, “the book,” first titled Nox Frater Nox, and then changed to just plain Nox, is an amazingly deep and unified poetic work, an epitaph for Anne’s brother who passed away in Europe in 2000. The book is also structured around Catullus’s Poem 101, about the poet’s brother who died in the Troad. “Nothing at all is known of the brother except his death,” Anne writes. “Catullus appears to have traveled from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at his grave.” In Nox she describes the process of translating the poem. One of my favorite parts of the book is when she writes: “Over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.” There is a tone of distance, and yet heartbreaking loss, that marks Nox, making it an unforgettable work. The writing itself is incredible, but the photos and materials reproduced in the book heighten its impact.

Anne, Currie, and I agreed that New Directions would scan the pages and reproduce them in an accordion-like, removable, fold out, that could be picked up and read and taken out of—and put back into— a box. We had just had pretty good luck publishing B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates in a similar format (in unbound signatures in a box) and been able to produce the book pretty reasonably in China. So what you see is what we set out to accomplish. Many people associated with New Directions helped with the production of Nox: Thomas Keith, our Production Manager at the time, now our Tennessee Williams editor, oversaw much of the production; Jennifer Van Dalsen at Holt was our liaison with the Chinese printer and contributed her expertise publishing complicated artistic books; the highly talented Rodrigo Corral designed the box; and Arlene Goldberg, a true star, did the scans. She really grasped that the scans needed to create a shaded, Xerox-machine effect and spent countless hours (many more than we paid her for) to make sure the scans were just perfect.

Paul Yamazaki at City Lights Bookstore recently wrote me saying he thought Nox would be one of the major publishing events of the season. Our poet Forrest Gander told me it is the talk of the poetry world right now, and Paul Muldoon wrote me saying: “Love it.” Everyone who has seen and read Nox is bowled over, and I feel: how could it be otherwise? New Directions is so proud to publish this unique and marvelous work and we’re excited to see what the response will really be. And at such an affordable price, how could anyone resist it?

Declan Spring is the senior editor at New Directions.  Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, translator, and classicist. NOX is available now for preorder from this bookstore.