Over the last three decades, Anne Carson has forged a unique path in North American arts and letters. An often reserved and opaque writer, sometimes it is hard to tell whether something she has written is supposed to prompt laughter or tears, anxiety or hope, a profound meditation or a moment of escape from life’s weighty matters. In work full of references to both the ancient and modern worlds, high and low culture, she embraces a variety of different identities, genres, voices, and genders. She is unafraid to try anything, and yet by that very fact she remains hidden, a puzzle, a question. What kind of writer she is is even hotly debated: Is she a poet, an essayist, a memoirist, a collage artist? Perhaps all of the above and none as well. In this month’s Books & the Arts, Emily Wilson examines Carson’s kaleidoscopic oeuvre in light of her new collection, Wrong Norma. Appearing after almost a decade in which her major publications have been reimaginings of ancient Greek dramas, the book revisits many of her earlier and more familiar obsessions—Plato, Proust, art, swimming, film, scenery, violence, grief, desire, disappointment, dressing up, animals, aesthetics, and alienation—but the book also opens up new avenues of uncertainty and ambiguity, using “writing and art to find a kind of rightness in putting things together wrong.” “Trying to make a collage of disparate bits of writing and culture is a fun surrealist parlor game, and sometimes that is all it is,” Wilson writes. “But in Wrong Norma, more than in her earlier work, Carson is also interested in the connections that join the social fabric together and the places where it frays.” Read “The Myths of Anne Carson”