SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

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.’"

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. A former MacArthur Fellow, awards for her numerous books include the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Red Doc> was recently awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the inaugural Folio Prize. Her first full poetry collection, Short Talks, was published by Brick Books in 1992 and was presented as a new edition in 2015: SHORT TALKS: BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 1.

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

Susan Sontag

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

Jennifer Krasinski

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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