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Anne carson published Glass, Irony, and God in 1995, and although the collection was not showered with prizes like some of her later books its opening poem, "The Glass Essay," has come to define Carson's narrative technique. The place of "The Glass Essay" in the Canadian canon seems secure, having been republished in such standard anthologies as Gary Geddes's 15 Canadian Poets X 3 (2001) and Sharon Thesen's The New Long Poem Anthology (2001). The poem's international reputation is also growing, having been singled out for praise by the American classicist Guy Davenport in his introduction to Glass, Irony, and God (ix), as well as opening an Anglo-American collection of women's writing, Wild Workshop (1997). The "Hero" section of the "The Glass Essay" has even made its way into the 2006 version of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2864-67). Yet "Carson's genre-averse approach to writing" creates a good deal of confusion for critics because it "mixes poetry with essay, literary criticism, and other forms of prose, and her style is at once quirky, inventive, and erudite" (Kuiper). Many critics worry that her writing "fails as poetry, simply because it shows either crashing inability or an unbecoming contempt for the medium" (2), as Richard Potts says of Carson's The Beauty of the Husband (2001). Several Canadian critics share Potts's objections (Solway, Heer) and compound them by wondering how to situate Carson's poetry within the context of Canadian literature when her writing features few explicitly Canadian settings, characters, or homages to Canadian artists. I addressed some of these concerns in From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada (2008) by demonstrating how Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) might be situated within a Canadian tradition of poet-novelists, whereas American critics have countered accusations of "chopped prose" in Carson's writing by positioning it as the exemplary case of a hybrid and increasingly prominent genre, the "lyric essay" (D'Agata and Tall; see also Carson, "Woman" 32). In this article, I will explicate Carson's narrative technique in her signature poem by demonstrating how Carson employs the logic of the lyric essay to produce an extended, bilingual pun on the multiple senses of the English "glass" (transparent material, magnifying lens, mirror) and the French glace (ice,...