Wrong Norma

by Anne Carson

Overview

Anne Carson’s first original work since Float (Knopf, 2016)

Published here in a stunning edition with images created by Carson, several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like The New Yorker and The Paris Review. As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them ‘wrong.’" 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811230346
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	210,874
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/15/2024

Carson’s genre-bending latest (after H of H Playbook) features the time-splicing mythology readers have come to expect of her fiercely intelligent, mordantly articulate mind. Comprised largely of prose poems that are “cold but not shocking,” as Carson writes of the water, one of the collection’s touchstone elements, these poems revisit classical myth through contemporary idiom, performing “the ten thousand adjustments of vivid/ action.” Carson’s language is hyper-alert, her range of material and allusions making her lines unpredictable, her speaker a guide to “Sex divorce fighting longing realness pretending!” In “An Evening with Joseph Conrad,” she writes: “Once I was invited to a christening in a country far away. It was June. On the drive the weather closed in, grey and vague, typical summer weather for that region. The ceremony was in a tiny white church. Everyone sat packed like teeth. Short glorious off-key songs were sung by a ten-year-old girl. Short glorious off-key songs were sung.” Her use of hybrid forms and her quest for both surprise and accuracy leaves one gratefully wrong-footed, immersed in vignettes about freedom, time, and the search for “plain words” within a world seemingly designed to obstruct them. These are original poems from a poet who pushes and renews the medium. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Reading this astounding, virtuosic book is a sampling of interiority. It is extraordinary because the form partakes of the unjoined nature of human thought. But it needs adding, lest this should confound, that Carson’s trump card is that she is funny."

The Guardian - Kate Kellaway

"She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote."

Susan Sontag

"I haven’t discovered any writing in years that’s so marvelously disturbing. I just feel so happy that she’s around."

Alice Munro

"Few writers are better at capturing how the mind can flit between four things at once. Are these poems, stories, essays, philosophy? No—Anne Carson is a writer of llamas."

The Telegraph - Tristram Fane Saunders and Luke Kennard

"Her work is full of moments of startling originality and beauty."

Colm Tóibín

"Ultimately, it is the singular sense of originality that makes reading Anne Carson’s books such a pleasure, and Wrong Norma follows that formula—or rather, that lack of formula. Reading it feels like a madcap chase through the backlot of a golden era film studio, each piece with its own period, its own pace, its own marvelous parlor trick. Despite her assertions, nothing here feels wrong—every poem, every essay, every story feels intentional and new and right."

The Brooklyn Rail - Amber Sparks

"Carson perfectly captures the chop of thought in sentences that peak, foam, and break, each in their own time."

Bookforum - Jennifer Krasinski

"As with Carson’s previous books, Wrong Norma is magisterially contrarious in conception, an omnium-gatherum text ensconced in a sui generis sensibility."

Lithub

"Carson applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigor, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life."

New York Magazine - Sam Anderson

★ 06/01/2024

In a note to her newest collection, multi-award-winning Canadian poet/classicist Carson (Red Doc) claims, "The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them wrong." Yet as the collection moves from a woman swimming, to a non-encounter between Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy, to the eternal sky launching creation, to a raucous contemporary Socrates writing scoldingly to Krito, links do emerge. This is writing about the nature of writing, thinking about the nature of thinking, an effort to show how things are put together. A woman with unwanted visitors is calmed by the organizing principles of Roget's Thesaurus; a swimmer observes that "Every water / has its own rules," even as she considers the ludicrous contrast between her morning and that of immigrants denied transit. Meanwhile, the sky keeps a diary, and an assistant ("calm as linen") contemplates sonnets about "a boy's atrocious bloody bore- / dom… the steaming, / stinking heap of it urged into rhyme." Carson's own writing is as piercingly smart and perceptive as ever (she compares bread to "a freshly laundered / cuff white as its own piety.") VERDICT Original, erudite, yet straightforwardly written; highly recommended for poetry enthusiasts.

Library Journal