A finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, 2012

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

“[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.”

STAN MIR, Jacket2

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 an 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).

just recently nominated as a finalist for a 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.

ANDREW DAVID KING, Kenyon Review blog

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.” 

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN, Galatea Resurrects