A tango (like a marriage) is something dancers have to dance to the end. This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice--29 "tangos" of narrative verse that take readers vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart.

The Beauty Of The Husband is an essay on Keats's idea that beauty is truth, and is also the story of a marriage. It is told in 29 tangos. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end.
This clear-eyed, brutal, moving, darkly funny book tells a single story in an immediate, accessible voice-29 tangos of narrative verse that take us vividly through erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a long-time marriage that falls apart. Only award-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.

An exquisite meditation on love and loss that reads with the emotional depth-and with the ongoing resonance-of a great novel. - Elle
[An] eerie, elliptical, very beautiful elegy for a failed marriage.... Her verse pierces the mind with a laserlike light. - The New York Times
Her best book.... Her poetry's form and sensibility are quite unlike anything else. - The Globe & Mail (Toronto)