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.
— Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
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.’”
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.
— Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
Carson perfectly captures the chop of thought in sentences that peak, foam, and break, each in their own time.
— Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum
The lament of the sky, inseparable from erudition and wit, connect her work to the world in startling ways.
— Brian Dillon, 4columns
What emerges from Wrong Norma is the mesmerizing working of a mind in process, of Anne Carson, a kosmos, to borrow the infinite self-stylings of Walt Whitman.
— Rowland Bagnall, Los Angeles Review of Books
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.
— Amber Sparks, The Brooklyn Rail
Carson’s genre-bending latest features the time-splicing mythology readers have come to expect of her fiercely intelligent, mordantly articulate mind… 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.
— Publishers Weekly (starred)
Fiercely intelligent but effortlessly readable—and fun… But Carson’s jokes aren’t just jokes. There’s a lightly worn authority behind them, an honesty: you can be funny and serious. It’s a quintessentially Carson balance of thought and feeling.
— Tristam Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
As with Carson’s previous books, Wrong Norma is magisterially contrarious in conception, an omnium-gatherum text ensconced in a sui generis sensibility.
— Lithub
In Wrong Norma, Carson uses all the forms she has made her own in her decades-long career as poet, translator, classicist, creator of genre-bending and genre-defying short prose, and visual artist. … Carson has her inimitable way with words: ‘Washington’s eyes flapped open like a soul on a clothesline.’
— Michael Autrey, Booklist
Scintillating, strangely affecting… Each prose poem displays a precision, an attentiveness to the mildest of incidents as well as the most monumental of aftershocks.
— Tara Okeke, The Skinny
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
Her work is full of moments of startling originality and beauty.
— Colm Tóibín
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.
— Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
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.
— Tristram Fane Saunders and Luke Kennard, The Telegraph
