Review by Booklist Review
The word anthology comes from the Greek for a gathering of flowers. It came into English as we use it now in the seventeenth century to refer to a collection of poems, stories, or plays. In Wrong Norma, Carson uses all the forms she has made her own in her decades-long career as poet, translator, classicist, creator of genre-bending and genre-defying short prose, and visual artist. Here readers will discover a "letter from Sokrates in gaol," cryptic collages, a truly strange story written by the sky that includes the sky's "interview" of Godot, who prefers, apparently, to go by Rusty, his first name. Nearly every piece includes arcane knowledge from a variety of disciplines, from herpetology to the pioneering work of the "amateur nephologist" Mr. Luke Howard, creator of a taxonomy of clouds. The longest piece, "Thret," is both a parody and an homage to forensic crime shows, noir film, and pulp fiction. Yet even in work that verges, occasionally, on the precious, Carson has her inimitable way with words: "Washington's eyes flapped open like a soul on a clothesline."
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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In a note to her newest collection, multi-award-winning Canadian poet/classicist Carson (Red Doc\> ) claims, "The pieces are not linked. That's why I've called them wrong." Yet as the collection moves from a woman swimming, to a non-encounter between Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy, to the eternal sky launching creation, to a raucous contemporary Socrates writing scoldingly to Krito, links do emerge. This is writing about the nature of writing, thinking about the nature of thinking, an effort to show how things are put together. A woman with unwanted visitors is calmed by the organizing principles of Roget's Thesaurus; a swimmer observes that "Every water / has its own rules," even as she considers the ludicrous contrast between her morning and that of immigrants denied transit. Meanwhile, the sky keeps a diary, and an assistant ("calm as linen") contemplates sonnets about "a boy's atrocious bloody bore- / dom… the steaming, / stinking heap of it urged into rhyme." Carson's own writing is as piercingly smart and perceptive as ever (she compares bread to "a freshly laundered / cuff white as its own piety.") VERDICT Original, erudite, yet straightforwardly written; highly recommended for poetry enthusiasts.
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