Author(s): Anne Carson

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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

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, classicist and translator. In Wrong Norma, variously described as prose poems or prose pieces, she is confronting writing and ideas. She allows thoughts to take the lead, to follow the other, in sometimes bewildering, sometimes illogical ways to paces where juxtapositions and contradictions segue into each other with a wonderful ‘wrongness’. And what is the idea of wrong? Her description of this project (as most of her published works are: she makes a handmade book, which is then produced as a facsimile by her publisher) is elusive and offers a brief explanation: “...a collection of wrings about different things..” And this collection is wide-ranging in subject matter, from swimming to snow, Joseph Conrad and Emily Dickinson, riffs on Socrates and violence, observations on poverty and displacement, a piece of writing by the Sky, in fact a week-long journal, my favourite being a conversation on Wednesday with Godot, and an image essay reimagining the meeting of the German philosopher Heidigger and the Jewish writing Paul Celan in 1966. Re-reading any one of these prose pieces is submerging. (The idea of suubmerging also links strongly to the first piece on swimming, so desire to be in water, out of air). They are endlessly curious, striving forward, to what one is never completely sure, and this makes them compelling. You return to discover something new and surprising each time, and it makes you ask questions rather than look for answers. In this work, Anne Carson seems to be asking questions and there are these wonderful scrap paper interludes between each piece. Some with merely a faintly typed comment or questions. Others that are dialogue, questions and answers, the questions often repeated, the answers varied — are they questions put to a host of visitors or characters or the author talking to herself? These repetitive questions include: “ Do you like the films of Eric Rohmer?”, followed by “Do you like jam?”, as if asking these simultaneously is a given. The other question that pops up repeatedly is “ What is yor philosophy of time?” With answers variously being: “I’m quite sure we’ll surrender” to “ how it’s sweet and how it’s moving” and “ a shallow closet with narrow bench and a rope to pull you up”. Are the recipients answering this question or even hearing it? Or are we always in conversation at cross purposes? Many of the text peices are reflecting on the process of writing. What is language, and how does it work? When translation is evoked, what happens to the text, whether this is translating yourself or others? Perspective and observation can be wrong and this wrongness leads to discoveries. Anne Carson calls these pieces wrong and enjoys herself. These is intelligent and playful writing. There is much here to amuse, as well as provoke thinking. But who or what is Norma? There is a reference in one piece to Norma Desmond, a character played in a film by Gloria Swanson, but I wondered if here the translator in Carson comes to the fore. Norma in latin can mean rule or pattern; in Greek, examiner. In an interview with Paris Review, Carson describes writing like seeing and following a fox. “I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it’s interesting. It’s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It’s just following a track.”

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