Finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2011
A memoir of place (Boston, New York, Oakland and San Francisco) and of the commons—gardens and libraries, streets and subways, marriage and family—and a hybrid work of poetry and prose, The Public Gardens is a documentary (with lyrics) of a life lived in, around, and for books. This hybrid work of non-fiction and poetry is the first in a trilogy that continues with Wite Out: Love and Work (2020).
The Public Gardens is a brilliant, wonderful book, a sort of a wild institution, intense and readable. Linda Norton looks at the world like a dog who likes to tear apart couches—repressed but not for long. Though full of shame, this book is shameless. A life is freely divulged as are the multitude of homeopathic bits from the author's reading list. The overall experience of moving through The Public Gardens’s shuttling prose and poetry is quietly breathtaking. I have felt and learned much from this book! Her 'Gardens' are both organized and entirely disorderly—anything and anyone from any point in history might saunter through, and that's the meaning of public, isn't it? 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
Have you ever heard Dinah Washington sing ‘This Bitter Earth’? Have you ever seen the movie by Charles Burnett called Killer of Sheep? This little book, The Public Gardens, conjures up the experience of that movie and that song, the fate of families and neighborhoods in 20th-century America. Although the title of the book shows that its ultimate point of reference is Boston, the work inside travels through New York and Oakland. Part poetry, part notebooks, it is a model of the camera made human, made humanist, a part of arm, leg, hand, a moving-picture taker pregnant with literature. What she sees, we have all seen and passed by. But she has paused to note it.
Steeped in the language of Scripture and Emerson, the poetry here is fresh and wild, cultivated and desperate. Linda is Sicilian but everything in her is modern. She hates what she loves. This makes her lonely, inspired, uprooted, still hunting, and blissed out whenever possible. She 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
She looks back on her personal history with tough self-reckoning which she then crystal cuts to near sparkling perfection. Her bearing down on experience to yield the truths of life lived has no fluff. . . . Norton shares her losses: at the death of brother, the unfolding of her marriage, historical readings/visions of society in her visits home to family in Boston, and finally her relocation to California for work. She's found what abides is observing moments of one's life, being aware of what's happening as it happens. There's joy to be found round daily business.
Norton] prefers the communal to the individual, a preference that provides shelter to work without the burden of attention. Without a doubt, this communal impulse shapes the interrogative quality of Norton’s writing . . . Norton’s skillful writing in her journals shows the complexity of the AIDS legacy, and more acutely, how layered Norton’s difficult memories are concerning her family. The ability to weave these layers as honestly as Norton does in The Public Gardens is rare. How often is one willing to look hard at one’s family and milieu, write about them, and then publish it? Certainly, there are acres of memoirs published every year that proclaim penetrating introspection, but few are as probing as Norton’s.
It’s startling how continually aware Norton is of her past, and impressive to see her determination to help shape a life that’s distinct to [her daughter], perhaps one less burdened by class anxiety and built-in Catholic guilt. The care that Norton takes with each of her subjects in The Public Gardens — the feminine, art making, and family life to name a few — ought to have much influence on her audience . . . Her book is an achievement built on her years of quietly working in the background, which is to say this book is a testament to patience.
Through its combination of genres and styles, [The Public Gardens]—just recently nominated as a finalist for the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize—examines conceptions of history and its drawing board, time, in a way as analytic as it is human. Norton’s sources and starting points are indiscriminate: her own notes, diaries, and apostrophic laments; quotations and epigraphs from Hazlitt, Castellanos, Berryman, Silesius, and others; a waterlogged Bible found in the Lower Ninth Ward two years after Hurricane Katrina. Along the way, she documents her relationship with religion and spirituality, those metaphysical accounts themselves so dependent on the text of scripture for communication. But she keeps her eyes on the ground.
What she sees, we have all seen and passed by. But she has paused and noted it,' Fanny Howe writes in the book’s introduction, echoing Joan Didion’s comments on her own compulsion to take notes. And then later: “She hates what she loves.” Here we have both the raw data and the research materials, the hypotheses and the counterfactuals, the thoughts and the poems that follow, and the whole rainbow of emotions.
Norton’s rejoinder to suffering, shame, loss, and the drudge of economic necessity is to encounter the world with a keen interest that is by turns plaintive and robustly humorous. . . . Right inside [the] gap of transition and loss, Norton locates a site of empathy and mystery.
ELIZABETH ROBINSON, Otis Review
