Anne Carson, _Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera_

 ...NOT TO MENTION an oratorio and a screenplay.  Carson is nothing if not generous.

I think this replaces Glass, Irony, God as my favorite book by Anne Carson. It's close. The screenplay about Abelard and Heloise perplexed me, I have to say. But the opera and its accompanying essays, in which Carson finds a way of using Sappho's famous fragment about the man sitting across her from her beloved to illuminate the religious thought of Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil, seems to me the best example I have yet seen of how Carson combines lightly-carried learning, audacious thinking, and lyrical grace to tell us something we really need to know--in this case how we sometimes need to get out of our own way, so to speak.