Wrong Norma
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Anne Carson’s first original work since Float (Knopf, 2016)
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2024
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY
FINALIST FOR THE 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.’"
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carson's genre-bending latest (after H of H Playbook) features the time-splicing mythology readers have come to expect of her fiercely intelligent, mordantly articulate mind. Comprised largely of prose poems that are "cold but not shocking," as Carson writes of the water, one of the collection's touchstone elements, these poems revisit classical myth through contemporary idiom, performing "the ten thousand adjustments of vivid/ action." Carson's language is hyper-alert, her range of material and allusions making her lines unpredictable, her speaker a guide to "Sex divorce fighting longing realness pretending!" In "An Evening with Joseph Conrad," she writes: "Once I was invited to a christening in a country far away. It was June. On the drive the weather closed in, grey and vague, typical summer weather for that region. The ceremony was in a tiny white church. Everyone sat packed like teeth. Short glorious off-key songs were sung by a ten-year-old girl. Short glorious off-key songs were sung." 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.
