Anne Carson doesn’t always overthink her titles. She called her 2013 book Red Doc> because that was the default name of her draft, automatically generated by her computer—a title derived from an abdication of one. Red Doc> is a sequel to Carson’s popular ‘novel in verse’, Autobiography of Red (1998), an adolescent love story inspired by the surviving fragments of a poem by Stesichoros about the myth of Herakles and a red, winged monster named Geryon. In the middle of Red Doc>’s black cover are horizontal streaks of red. It looks like the residue of a hasty swipe of a calligraphy brush, or as though the cover of Autobiography of Red—also black, with a pristine red circle at its centre—has been smeared. In one of Carson’s oblique manifestoes, ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, which is about Joan of Arc and Francis Bacon and their shared aversion to cliché and the ‘boredom of storytelling’, Carson explained that Bacon defeated narrative by making ‘free marks’ on his canvas: ‘He uses brushes, sponges, sticks, rags, his hand, or just throws a can of paint at it’. Red Doc>’s cover could be described as a similarly resourceful defacement. The red brushstrokes—almost like a ‘Keep Out’ sign—echo the spirit of its ‘found’ title. It rebuffs interpretation and so of course incites it.

Carson’s new book is called Wrong Norma, she explains on the back, because it is a ‘collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong.’ As with many of Carson’s utterances, the aroma of a joke wafts off this deadpan explanation. Why is a miscellaneous collection a ‘wrong’ one? Isn’t ‘wrong’ the wrong word? Indeed Wrong Norma sounds a bit like a scrambled translation of ‘misnomer’ (from the old French verb mesnommer, mes-, ‘wrongly’, nommer, ‘to name’: Wrong Nommer). And who is ‘Norma’ and how did she earn such an epithet?

It’s difficult not to think of Wrong Norma as a kind of alter-ego. (In a recent interview with the Paris Review, Carson suggested the title was a reference to being Canadian: Canadians are ‘polite, but wrong. All the time, polite but wrong’.) Her writing is enlivened by wrongness of various kinds. ‘I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you’, she announces in an early piece called ‘Short Talk On Shelter’. Carson is an advocate for the experience of confusion and attracted to the things liable to cause it, such as incoherence, contradiction, fragments and riddles. She defines poetry—in a poem confusingly titled ‘Essay on What I Think About Most’—as ‘the willful creation of error’. ‘Not understanding is an interesting state of mind’, she has said: ‘poetry is an instrument of producing this state of mind.’

If Wrong Norma is ‘wrong’ because its pieces are ‘not linked’, many of Carson’s books ought to have been called Wrong, too. Her last collection, Float (2016), was especially wrong because its 22 disparate texts—about Hegel, Godard, her great-uncle Harry and so on—were literally not linked; the ‘book’ is in fact a clear plastic slip case containing paper pamphlets that can be read in any order. But eclecticism has reigned from the outset, as has puzzling and unsettling readers by playing fast and loose with genre. Carson’s collections tend to be assortments containing poetry and essays and things in between. Some of her essays look like poems or read like short stories. One ends with an ode; ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’ offers, in lieu of a conclusion, several translations of an ancient Greek lyric ‘using the wrong words’ (including Brecht’s fbi file and the manual for her new microwave).

Her books do not only feature unusual forms—‘epitaphs’, librettos—but wacky hybrids that arguably don’t exist (‘a fictional essay in 29 tangos’, a ‘lecture’ in ‘the form of 15 sonnets’). ‘Father’s Old Blue Cardigan’—a ‘straightforward poem’, as Charles Simic once described it, which appears in her collection Men in the Off Hours (2000)—seems almost an oddity in its motley context. Sometimes Carson encases forms in other forms (‘formal detritus’, in the phrase of one critic). Autobiography of Red is prefaced by a translation of the remains of the original Greek lyric and several appendices, and followed by a spoof interview with Stesichoros. A mesmerizing pamphlet in Float, ‘Uncle Falling’, consists of a pair of ‘lyric lectures’—a typically ambiguous blend of essay and narrative, scholarship and memoir—written in the form of a play. The dialogue of ‘Lecturer i’ and ‘Lecturer ii’ is broken up by interjections—usually baffling, occasionally profound—from a four-person chorus of Gertrude Steins (each holding a Gertrude Stein mask).

Carson’s writing is not only unlike anyone else’s; it is unlike itself (‘No two poems are the same’, as Guy Davenport has observed). One continuity, however, is incongruousness. She specializes in conspicuously far-fetched comparisons, often unlikely pairings of classical and modern writers or artists—Thucydides and Virginia Woolf, Joan of Arc and Francis Bacon, Homer and John Ashbery. Almost everything she writes is about several things at once, and ranges associatively across the history of Western thought. An essay about sleep (or as Carson’s subtitle has it, ‘A Praise of Sleep’), included in her 2005 collection Decreation, refers to Aristotle, Kant, Elizabeth Bishop, Lacan, Tom Stoppard, Woolf, Plato and Homer. Even her most single-minded book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), a scholarly inquiry into ancient Greek conceptions of desire based on her doctoral dissertation, skips, in a mere two pages, from Sappho to Plato to Simone Weil to Emily Dickinson to Petrarch, then to Sartre, de Beauvoir and Lacan, before returning to Sappho.

Carson’s work is also ‘wrong’ in its impropriety—‘impertinence’, as she says in the preface to Eros the Bittersweet: its charismatic transgression of disciplinary boundaries and other kinds of etiquette (she told the Paris Review that the title Wrong Norma was also a defiant allusion to the competitive scrupulousness demanded by ‘academic life’). Despite their erudition, works of criticism like Eros the Bittersweet and her comparative study of Simonides and Paul Celan, Economy of the Unlost (1999), are too peculiar and elegant to be classed as straightforwardly academic books, besides having an obliquely autobiographical intensity. Her poetry, meanwhile, which often deals with painful personal themes—the break-up of a relationship (‘wrong love’), her father’s dementia, the sudden death of her estranged brother—is liable to have a literary-critical dimension or draw on her Hellenic scholarship. Her early masterpiece, ‘The Glass Essay’ (a poem, naturally, though it’s almost another ‘novel in verse’), is about visiting her parents while grieving the departure of her lover but also a reflection on the life and writing of Emily Brontë (it even includes quotations from critical commentaries); The Beauty of the Husband (2001) is a narrative poem about the collapse of a marriage spliced with Keats; her elegy for her brother, Nox (2010), is partly about Herodotus and the writing of history.