Skip to main content

About the Book

About the Book

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

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.

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos
by Anne Carson

  • Publication Date: February 19, 2002
  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 0375707573
  • ISBN-13: 9780375707575