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

'Effortlessly readable... Fun' DAILY TELEGRAPH

'I'm a big fan... She pinpoints the collision of oracle and anachronism' TEJU COLE

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".

"Uncompromisingly intelligent, while being effortlessly readable, and – a word critics don’t often use about Carson – fun" - Daily Telegraph

"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

"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