"it is the singular sense of originality that makes reading Carson’s books such a pleasure, and Wrong Norma follows that formula—or that lack of formula…Despite her assertions, nothing here feels wrong—every poem, every essay, every story feels intentional and new and right."

"alongside genial poetic conceits there are works here of abiding strangeness and profundity… Carson can seem a rarefied, scholarly, or forbidding poet; but such moments as the lament of the sky, inseparable from erudition and wit, connect her work to the world in startling ways."