Inanna (Centre Chorégraphique National de Roubaix, 2005)
Autumn 2005, Carolyn Carlson prepares her first creation for the Centre Chorégraphique National de Roubaix, which she had taken over as director a few months earlier. In homage to the city's industrial remains, ghosts of the lives dedicated to them, she takes Euan Burnet-Smith and the performers on a strange journey through the abandoned spaces of Roubaix's Condition Publique. At the extreme point of this lost and collapsed world, they discover an unvarnished femininity, a poetry of penumbra. The images, poems and inks that make up this book reflect this. This work is no longer published, but a few copies are on sale at the company's boutique on tour.
Solo poèmes et encres (Alternatives, Gallimard, 2003) - No longer published
For Carolyn Carlson, the world, destiny, love and death are all spiritual themes reminiscent of Zen or Tao "postures" of marvelous simplicity. These illustrated poems, chosen from her many notebooks, give us a glimpse of how thought and the spiritual can engender the calligraphic sign in the choreographer's work. This book is no longer published, but a few copies are on sale at the company's boutique during tours.
Le Soi et le rien (Actes Sud, 2002)
La chorégraphe et danseuse Carolyn Carlson a réuni quelques poèmes et pensées qui, depuis des années, fécondent sa réflexion sur l’esprit et le mouvement. Illustrés à l’encre de Chine par l’auteur, ces textes sont proches des kôan du bouddhisme zen.
Nouvelle édition sortie en octobre 2025
Un saut dans le bleu (Actes Sud, 2025)
Outre ses créations chorégraphiques, Carolyn Carlson est poète et calligraphe. Après Le Soi et le Rien en 2002 et Brins d’herbe en 2011, la collection “Le Souffle de l’esprit” accueille Un saut dans le bleu, son troisième recueil de poèmes. On y retrouve sa manière elliptique, son sens de l’image et un rythme qui s’accorde parfaitement aux mouvements de ses calligraphies, dont deux illustrent l’ouvrage.
Portraits of souls (Le Seuil, 2024)
Book of interviews by Audrey Fella with
Irina Brook, Camille and Carolyn Carlson
In pages filled with their presence, Carolyn Carlson, Irina Brook and Camille take us on a journey through their lives and their work, which lifts the soul. Thanks to their talent, they have elevated their art to a path of enlightenment. Readers are invited to an encounter with them as much as with themselves. And to take another look at the world, one that is sensitive, poetic and creative.
Audrey Fella
Au bord de l'infini (Le Passeur, 2019)
Jean-Pierre Siméon, Preface
"As a result, whoever opens this book should throw away the umbrella of logic and the cloak of reasoning before entering, and let his own breathing embrace the breathing of the poem: this is the key. His reading will then be, in Hölderlin's words, "a conversation from soul to soul".
Carolyn Carlson's poetry is great in that it can only be given in this kind of reading, the only one that makes our consciousness available to the perpetual metamorphoses of life, its magnificent and troubling secret.
Writings on water (Actes Sud, 2017)
Exhibition catalog co-written by Hélène de Talhouët
Carolyn Carlson has always written, drawn and painted. To dance and while dancing, one might say of the choreographer who describes her dance as visual poetry. Carlson smiles as she recalls the millions of blackened and colored pages of her notebooks, which she donated to the BnF in 2013. Like so many precious witnesses to her thinking, her relationship with nature, her creative process, her madness and her humor.
Carolyn Carlson, from the intimate to the universal (Actes Sud, 2015)
Biography by Thierry Delcourt
Thierry Delcourt, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is the author of this biographical essay devoted to the choreographer, dancer, calligrapher, poet and teacher. The book explores all the registers Carlson used to express and convey her creative universe. It is the first study of its kind dedicated to this artist, whose creative output has been uninterrupted for over fifty years.
This essay, which follows a biographical chronology, is based on the lines of force that emerge from Carolyn Carlson's productions, the most important of which, and perhaps the most singular, is the notion of visual poetry.
Traces d'encre (Actes Sud, 2013)
Hassan MASSOUDY, Preface
As a choreographer and dancer, Carlson works with an ephemeral language, the gesture, which vanishes as soon as it is placed in space. The role of improvisation, a spontaneous narrative, is central to her research, and movement is born of itself, so to speak, in a "letting go" that allows it to exert its liberating force. Yet gesture is only one of the languages Carlson wields, as she is also a poet and calligrapher.
This album brings together a series of calligraphies accompanied by poems by Carolyn Carlson. The themes dear to the author are found here: ode to nature, to the unity of the world, spiritual quest.
Brins d'herbe (Actes Sud, 2011)
Chorégraphe, danseuse, poète et calligraphe, Carolyn Carlson propose une suite de poèmes dans la manière des haïku et des yaka japonais. Ces poésies brèves traduisent une réminiscence, une sensation, un état d’âme, inspirés par la pensée spirituelle de l’auteur.
Nouvelle édition sortie en octobre 2025
Dialogue with Rothko (Invenit, 2011)
Bilingual French/English edition of poems. Translation from the American by Jean-Pierre Siméon
"It would be nice if places could be built all over the country, sort of little chapels, in which a traveler or a walker could meditate for a long time on a single painting hung in a small room" (Mark Rothko)
No other artist so naturally matches the ambition of the Ekphrasis collection. The choreographer, dancer and poet Carolyn Carlson, who prefers the term "visual poetry" to "choreography", is a natural choice for this sensory fusion between the work and its recipient.
Paris-Venise-Paris (Photographs Claude Lê-Anh Actes Sud, 2010)
Far from the classic monograph, Paris Venise Paris is a singular, intimate album. It invites us to take a journey through the world of Carolyn Carlson, whose imaginary world is captured in Claude Lê-Anh's photo graphs, and to share the story of an encounter and a timeless friendship. Paris Venise Paris offers a crossroads. Claude Lê-Anh's, reflecting on thirty years of creation. That of Carolyn Carlson, who, through her texts and unpublished calligraphy, sincerely shares her impressions and feelings.