Wrong Norma

Praise for Wrong Norma

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

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

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’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)

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 perfectly captures the chop of thought in sentences that peak, foam, and break, each in their own time.
— Jennifer Krasinski - Bookforum

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