‘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, drawn and annotated by the author. Several of the twenty-five startling poetic prose pieces have appeared in magazines and journals like the New Yorker and the Paris Review. Anne Carson is probably our most 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”.
‘If she was a prose writer she would instantly be recognised as a genius’COLM TÓIBÍN
‘I’m a big fan… She pinpoints the collision of oracle and anachronism’TEJU COLE
