Anne Carson's Wrong Norma is a rigorous piling and sorting and lining up and knocking down of obsessions. Carson uses every tool at her disposal to launch her wild and muscular voice, assembling epic verse, translation, pocket theater, and prose into a restless bricolage. Scribbled notes are jammed between stories, one torn scrap of pink paper repeating "how do you make up your bed in the morning" like a bizarre and banal incantation. Handling like a workbook or a monograph, Wrong Norma's avante-garde, non-conformist streak is no surprise. Carson is a heavyweight in the renegade literary scene–a writer precariously labeled as a poet, a classicist, a philosopher, an essayist. Critique of her books is often focused on her formal idiosyncrasy.

 

Wrong Norma has been described (lovingly) as "a sampling", "unjoined", and eccentric", characterizations which Carson herself seemed to predict when she included a postscript on the back cover which reads simply, "The pieces are not linked." Sure, Carson speeds across a sprawl of references and forms. She uses every technique at her disposal to push the upper limit of what a narrative sentence is capable of. Formal breadth is inherent in but is not, I would argue,  the marrow of the book. Rather, her troubling of genre serves a thematic armature, a questioning of borders. Wrong Norma has an angst about who is inside and who is outside the house/song/forest/text. The narrator straddles the proverbial city limit, one eye on the mysteries beyond the wall, the other trained on the entanglement. 

 

"Poverty Remix (Sestina)" uses the Ancient Greek ritual of pharmakos, or human sacrifice, to face our continued rituals of cruelty and absolvement. In Ancient Greece, a citizen was stuffed with a feast, stripped, flogged and exiled. Carson considers this ritual against her contemporary experience of urban life and poverty. She writes: 

 

"I give a dollar or two dollars. Or bring all my quarters from home. Buy a homeless person a cup of coffee. Offer him a meal of barley cakes, cheese, black and white figs, then flog him on his genitals and drive him out of the city."

 

She uses Greek etymology, teasing out the double, triple, quadroupled meanings of words to show our cultural hypocrisy and crisis around exile, both within ourselves and our communities. She writes of the word pharmakos

 

"Official name of one sacrificed as an atonement for others or to cleanse a community. Scapegoat. Necessary theater of a good community conscience. A word that quarrels with itself. (...) means "poison" and "medicine."

 

The act of human sacrifice is a ritual of atonement and cleansing. Pharmakos is "a word that quarrels with itself," leaving unresolved problems: how do we cleanse ourselves of the shame of sacrifice? How can one still be fully part of a community when they have witnessed the hypocrisy of pharmakos–that "theater of good community conscience?" This piece gives a linguistic and historical grounding for the uneasy position between insider and outsider that permeates the book.  

 

This theme continues in her story "The Visitors," which describes the invasion of a troupe of musicians into the narrator's home. The story takes its name and backdrop from the multi-channel video piece of the same name. In the video piece, the musicians play the same folk-refrain for an hour, scattered across a decadent farmhouse. When I first watched it at SfMoMa, I rocked and wept, moved by the vertiginous momentum of the song. After seeing it a number of times, I found myself becoming suspicious and jealous of this contained twee, bohemian-homesteader utopia. In Carson’s version, the narrator is similarly wary of the troupe of musicians invading their home. 

 

"Are they religious? Is this some kind of ritual weekend? (...) I stumble in, door not locked, there lies a visitor in the tub in flagrante, guitar in his lap, head flung back to the wall, mouth agape with song, huge naked white foot propped on the taps (…) What a maelstrom in me."

 

The narrator finds solace in Roget's Thesaurus which they describe as "the opposite of anarchy!" Roget becomes an omnipresent ally and touchstone. (Companionship in Carson’s stories is often found in animals and dead writers.) A compulsion for the nesting and gathering of words is where the narrator finds recognition, speaking to Carson's compulsion throughout the book to pull every meaning from a word. Meanwhile, the visitors knock down jam jars, loom in the halls, sing until "the whole place was wailing like a dinosaur." The narrator finds some pleasure in their caterwaul while being unable to participate in it. Like "Poverty Remix (Sestina)" this piece is occupied with who is inside and outside of the house, inside and outside of the song. 

 

The crown jewel of Wrong Norma, "Thret", is a poetic detective procedural. A suburban stain-specialist takes on her town's drug lord. Like in "Poverty Remix," the purity of a community is accounted for by a lonely narrator who is not entirely enmeshed in that community. Like many voices in Wrong Norma, the narrator is more occupied with mysterious outsiders than the collective. They do find companionship and co-conspirators in a pair of crows, part of the book's overall interest in animal intelligence. The narrator is obsessed and determined to not only dismantle the criminal network in her town, and attempts to do so with rigorous and scientific accuracy. But their forensic intellect hits an impasse when their crow-friend is slain by "the hot little zip of a bullet,". Carson writes, "I am restless at a different level of accuracy." echoing the book's frustrated, rigorous pushing of language to access beyond our blind spots, or "that roar which lies on the other side of silence” as she quotes George Eliot in "Thret." 

 

Wrong Norma left me exhilarated and spent. Among a density of references and form are sequences that ratchet me to a fever pitch. As a writer, I find myself inflamed to manipulate my own sentences with as much discipline, agility, and zeal. Her command of language holds a mirror to our fallible rituals for shame and loneliness, to the vestigial remains which fester and shout no matter how hard we tr.