Carson, Anne. The Autobiography of Red. New York: Vintage, 1998.

This is the first novel in verse I've read, or at least that I can remember reading. The verse is very prose-y so I read quickly through it, which I know from experience is usually a bad idea when reading poetry.

At any rate what's worth mentioning about this book (which rewrites an obscure Greek myth about Herakles and Geryon, a red dragon whose red cattle the former killed as one of his labors) is how devotedly Carson adheres to the old Show Don't Tell dictum.

Pop Quiz!
Match the line of writing, which evokes a feeling inside a character, to the external action in the novel that caused that feeling.

1. "Geryon felt everything in the room hurl itself / away from him / towards the rims of the world."
2. "[His] voice went bouncing through Geryon on hot gold springs."
3. "Wrongness came like a lone finger / chopping through the room."
4. "Geryon's hot apple icepicks / all the way up his anus to his spine."

a) Geryon receives the news that his mother wouldn't be home for hours.
b) Geryon receives a phonecall from a long departed lover.
c) Geryon's car is suddenly surounded by men with guns.
d) Geryon is stoned and wishes he were in love.

Answers next time, but my point here is this: the answers should be apparent. If Carson is a good writer, which she undoubtedly is, her language should recreate the experience. Show Don't Tell isn't just a way to make things more specific, or to "liven up" one's writing. Show Don't Tell is the only way this wholly abstract and intellectual thing called reading and writing can become a physical experience.

There are words you can feel in the hollow gut of you, once someone's found a way to put them in the right order. Finding and ordering these words is what's so hard all the time.