Cloud of Witnesses by Linda Norton

In Cloud of Witnesses memoirist and poet Linda Norton laments and celebrates her bicoastal, peripatetic life (much of this material was assembled during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020) via the cento writ large: every paragraph of prose, every stanza of poetry, is informed by books she has read, half-read, collected into that well-known pile of to-be-reads. Poring over a life spent roaming libraries, museums, and public walkways in New York and California, Norton comes close to Benjamin’s dream (perhaps nightmare) of fashioning a book entirely out of quotations. Fortunately for her readers, she fails, allowing her own insights and observations to serve as the warp and woof of these familiar and unfamiliar citations. Like W. E. B. Du Bois finding solace in his library, Norton moves back and across “the color line,” sits with Shakespeare, Fanny Howe, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, etc., and they wince not, welcoming her into their esteemed company.

—Tyrone Williams

The Irish writer Dervla Murphy said one thing that made her sad about dying was not having enough time to re-read all her favourite books. Linda Norton's pandemic response to the "death" of her life in public was to re-read books as a kind of replacement for lost community. Cloud of Witnesses is a one-woman, New-Deal-WPA poetry intervention, privately funded by the writer's voracious reading, care, rage, and love. These poems are an emergency response to hollowness: to lockdown isolation, to erosion of public space by rapacious capitalism, to crumbling US democracy. Stacks of books --from the public and personal library—serve as laptop props for Zoom calls with friends. But then the books themselves start talking, and Norton is their witness. And, lucky for us, ours too.

—Alice Lyons

About The Public Gardens: Poems and History and Wite Out: Love and Work

The Public Gardens is a brilliant, wonderful book, a sort of a wild institution, intense and readable. . . . I find myself loving this writer's mind, light touch, and generous heart and I, reader, didn't want to go when it was done. My bowl is out. More! — EILEEN MYLES

Steeped in the language of Scripture and Emerson, the poetry here is fresh and wild, cultivated and desperate. . . [Norton] documents her losses and loves, both as a free person and a mother, and every word she writes has the bittersweet taste of Dinah Washington. — FANNY HOWE

A memoir about a single working mother coping in a rough world she sees all too clearly, Wite Out is a courageous book about a courageous life. I couldn't put it down. — NORMAN FISCHER

Wite Out is a masterpiece. — JOHN KEENE

Linda Norton is the author of Wite Out: Love and Work (2020), a memoir with poems, and its prequel, The Public Gardens: Poems and History (2011, introduction by Fanny Howe), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Norton is also the author of two chapbooks, Hesitation Kit (2007) and Dark White (2019).
Norton received a Creative Work Fund grant in 2014, the year she exhibited her collages at the Dock arts center in Ireland with support from the US Embassy in Dublin. Her collages have appeared on the covers of her own books as well as books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, and other writers. She was a 2020 columnist-in-residence at the SFMoMA Open Space.
Norton was born in Boston and lived in Brooklyn for many years before moving to Oakland, where she raised her daughter and met her foster son. Norton’s children are the heart and soul of Wite Out, a book John Keene and Eileen Myles call a “masterpiece” and Norman Fischer calls “a gorgeous, courageous book.”
Norton is a dual citizen of the US and Ireland/EU. She teaches online at the Yeats Academy at IT Sligo/Atlantic Technological University in Connaught, Ireland.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 102 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-464-2