Author(s): Anne Carson

Essay | Poetry

Wrong Norma is Anne Carson's first book of original material in eight years. 

As with her most recent publications, Wrong Norma is a facsimile edition of the original hand-designed book, annotated and corrected by the author. Anne Carson is a celebrated living poet, winner of countless awards and routinely tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Famously reticent, asking that her books be published without cover copy, she has agreed to say this- 'Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantanamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget's Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night, Sokrates, writing sonnets, forensics, encounters with lovers, the word "idea", the feet of Jesus, and Russian thugs. The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them "wrong".'

'I would read anything she wrote' SUSAN SONTAG

'If she was a prose writer she would instantly be recognised as a genius' COLM TOIBIN

Review:
 Uncompromisingly intelligent, while being effortlessly readable, and - a word critics don't often use about Carson - fun * Daily Telegraph *
I'm a big fan of her work... There's a joy in encountering a mind that takes nothing for granted... She pinpoints the collision of oracle and anachronism -- Teju Cole, author of Tremor
Wrong Norma is the poet at her best: humorous, whimsical, erudite, moving, unpretentious * Times Literary Supplement *
Reading this astounding, virtuosic book is a sampling of interiority. It is extraordinary because the form partakes the unjoined nature of human thought.... A triumph of a book * Observer *
Carson's latest work displays her brilliance and originality through a series of hybrid, free-flowing text interspersed with images and digressions... These prose poems evince clarity, precision and attention * Guardian *
She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote -- Susan Sontag, author of Against Interpretation
Powerfully moving... Wrong Norma can also be funny... Full of wit, pain and the wonder of language * Spectator *
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 *
Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today -- Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient
Her work is full of moments of startling originality and beauty. The poems play with character and plot, myth and magic; they are rich with attitude and wit and the undertow of grief. If she was a prose writer she would instantly be recognised as a genius -- Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn