Linda Norton, Cloud of Witnesses named one of The Progressive Magazine’s Favorite Books of 2024

Written By Geoffrey Gatza

 

Jules Gibbs pick’s Linda Norton, Cloud of Witnesses (BlazeVOX) and Hanif Abdurraqib’s new book of essays, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House) for her choice of The Progressive Magazine’s Favorite Books of 2024

 

Gibbs’ says, A new book of essays, poems, and collages by polymath, littérateur, and contributor to The Progressive Linda Norton, Cloud of Witnesses (BlazeVOX), was assembled during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. It is a brilliant one-woman show—fortified by books from the Oakland Public Library and her re-encounter with her own books and margin notes. It is the act of a bright mind ranging, breaking, careening, and juxtaposing disparate voices from the time of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. She makes “herself available to what walks up,” like Joni Mitchell at the Newport Jazz Festival. She is a supreme witness of our historical, cultural moment, and of rage and love and enduring.

 

Read the whole list of The Progressive Magazine’s Favorite Books of 2024

https://progressive.org/magazine/the-progressives-favorite-books-of-2024-20241209/

 

Read more about Linda Norton, Cloud of Witnesses here

Geoffrey Gatza

Bio Note: Geoffrey Gatza is the author of the poetry collections The House of Forgetting (2012), Apollo: A Conceptual Poem (2014), and A Dog Lost in the Brick City of Outlawed Trees (2018).

 

Divya Victor, in an article for poetryfoundation.org, said of Apollo: A Conceptual Poem “The diversity of these works echoes the complexities of the subject, but together they posit something specific, the heightened relationship between the interior self and the exterior world.”

 

Gatza’s poems have been published in anthologies, as well as magazines and journals including Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, The Pickled Body, Peach Mag, Tupelo Quarterly and various others. His play on Marcel Duchamp was staged in an art installation in Philadelphia and performed in NYC.

 

Gatza is an award-winning editor, publisher and poet. He is the driving force behind BlazeVOX, an independent press located in Buffalo, NY, specializing in innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Geoffrey Gatza is lives in Kenmore, NY.

editor@blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org

http://www.blazevox.org
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