Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
Acclaimed poet and polymath Anne Carson returns with Wrong Norma, a series of unconnected yet beautifully coherent vignettes
What might it take for white bread – the starchy sum of hyper-processed, hypo-nutritive parts – to become a 'fetish'? Could the sky be a diarist on the sly? Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma – the polymath’s ode to disorganising principles – tees up such hypotheticals to strike a range of scintillating, strangely affecting, and largely unconnected scenes.
While the featured scenes may be without link – hence, in Carson’s estimation, their aggregate 'wrong[ness]' – they are far from scattershot. Each prose poem displays a precision, an attentiveness to the mildest of incidents as well as the most monumental of aftershocks, that lends the collection a tonal coherence. With an assist from illustrative glyphs that sidle up to the reader and recurring interrogative type about 'philosoph[ies] of time' that dissolve into the page, Carson reckons with the 'limits of human wisdom' on matters both heavy and heartsome.
'There’s a fear in rules and stupidity in sentences,' Carson writes. That very well may be, but there is also a luminosity to the latter. How else – other than bright and beautiful – might you describe the stack of sandwich bread sitting as pretty as a 'freshly laundered cuff' in An Evening with Joseph Conrad? Or the 'superhot' empyrean darling chronicling its daily doings in Lecture on the History of Skywriting? Wrong Norma: feels – and reads – so right.