Praise for

Wite Out: Love and Work

With Wite Out, Linda Norton breaks fresh ground as an autobiographical poememoirist. Combining an exploration of her familial roots, an interrogation and critique of whiteness as lived experience, a diaristic account of relationships in all their complexity, and a personal, social, and cultural history of certain precincts in American poetry's late 20th-century avant-garde, Wite Out is a masterpiece.

JOHN KEENE

Wite Out is a gorgeous book. Its spare, crystal-clear, non-confessional prose highlights feminine honesty rather than masculine concealment and makes you both sad and glad to be human. A memoir about a single working mother coping in a rough world she sees all too clearly, this is a courageous book about a courageous life; I couldn't put it down."

NORMAN FISCHER

"Reading WITE OUT also made me wonder where that missing letter went? What did it stand for and what was crouching in the lean-to of its variously broken loop? Horror? Responsibility? It's just that how to take responsibility for horror has always seemed impossible because it means approaching the mass that assures annihilation. Whiteness is a black hole in this regard, but Linda Norton braves its event horizon, its point of no return, giving us leave to let go absolution to abolish, and fray the singularity to survive into some other dance we've been dancing, but denying, all along. In the proliferation of such release, we might hold on."

FRED MOTEN

The explanatory title of Wite Out: Love and Work is an accurate if not condensed summation of Linda Norton’s fourth book, published in May 2020 by Hanging Loose Press. Wite Out’s themes are vast and bold, but the essence of what Norton writes about is the work that it takes to sustain love despite a biased, imperialist, and often harmful world.

Wite Out derives its title from the trademarked correction fluid that Norton uses as a medium in her collage work (one such piece is used for the book’s cover). The title — playful, as is Norton — signals to the serious analysis offered throughout the book on white identity. What Norton does in her writing, as stated in an epigraph by Fred Moten, is to identify “the shit you can’t say shit about.”

KATIE EBBITT, Poetry Project Newsletter

I'm reading [Wite Out: Love and Work] from Hanging Loose and I already think it's a masterpiece.

EILEEN MYLES on Instagram

Last year Lake Merritt’s own Linda Norton produced Wite Out: Love and Work, this long memoir-poem that examines how a white-identified woman has encountered, and resisted, linguistic white supremacist terrorism throughout her life. Norton’s observations hit home, mostly because she employs the language of white privilege to both examine and excavate it. Wite Out is a must for anyone trying to understand the nuanced aggression of systemic oppression and how it affects the afflictor and afflicted in equal measure.

D. SCOT MILLER, East Bay Express

White supremacy permeates our lives so thoroughly that the language to recognize and convey its brutal and relentless mutilation of human relationships is indeed lacking. So what language can be used—invented, repurposed, reinvented—to investigate white supremacy and apprehend whiteness, particularly on the complicated micro levels of human relationships? In Wite Out: Love and Work, a hybrid collection of autobiographical journal pieces interspersed with poems, Linda Norton chronicles the spaces of work and love that she moves through as a “dark white” (the title of the book’s first section) — a white woman with immigrant grandparents (one Irish, the other Sicilian) — with a long, deep history of family trauma and financial insecurity. Her brother Joey died from AIDS; her ensuing grief is constant through Wite Out, as well as its prequel, The Public Gardens. The other brother, Richard, is mentally ill, a self-imagined genius who tells Norton he is making a living driving a taxi while also asking her for money. Her relationship with her parents is complicated, sometimes perilous, and holds insistent echoes of the immigrant experience as shaped by the US structures of white supremacy. Norton writes how the complexions of Sicilian immigrants, including her mother’s parents, were noted upon US arrival: “dark, fair, swarthy, whatever.” On the other hand, skin color was not indicated on ship manifests from Ireland, “like the Scythia on which my father’s mother arrived from Cobh that same year.”

Vee [a character in Wite Out] makes clear to Norton the accumulated exhaustion of similarly racist encounters, asking, “Why don’t white people talk about racism with other white people?” Norton replies, “a self-righteous white person is a ridiculous figure everywhere … Because maybe she thinks she knows, but what does she know?” But then, she writes, “It’s true that fools are my favorite characters in literature. Maybe there is a role for a fool like me.” Here, Norton provides a glimpse of a new language that might at first read as “foolish,” but which might open a way for white people who want to see and talk about whiteness for what it is — all of its horrors, all of our complicity.

MARCELLA DURAND, Hyperallergic

Of the many beautiful things Saidiya Hartman writes about, one of the most beautiful is the “flexible and elastic kinship” that black families exhibited: women serving as breadwinners; men raising other men’s children; aunts and uncles and cousins all living together. These practices were not a sign of moral degradation, as contemporary sociologists often claimed, but a sign of moral resilience: “a resource for black survival, a practice that documented the generosity and mutuality of the poor.” Affiliation is less a result of blood than an act of love.

Linda Norton’s second book, Wite Out: Love and Work, also explores the beauties and complexities of affiliation—and how these beauties and complexities are informed, as almost everything in America is, by race. Norton, a poet and visual artist, was born in Boston. Her mother’s side was Sicilian; her father’s side was Irish. In this book, which braids together journal entries and poems in a collage-like fashion (the sub-subtitle is A memoir with poems), Norton remembers her family’s racism as a childhood refrain. Her grandmother warned her against traveling: “Chicago—a lotta black people!” When the family watched the violent suppression of the civil-rights movement, Norton writes, “My mother mocked me for taking it too seriously: ‘Oh, Linda loves the Colored people.’” Norton’s aunts and cousins “were the last white people in the projects.” One day, after they looked after a young black neighbor, the neighbor’s mother kindly and inexplicably left some issues of Jet as thanks. While looking at the magazine’s photos of Emmett Till’s body, Norton’s mother declared, “He shouldn’t a said nothin’.… The mouth on him.” Her favorite aunt responds, “What kind of mother lets them put a picture like that on the cover of a magazine?” After the 1967 riots, Norton’s aunt and cousins left the projects, too.

That’s one meaning behind the book’s title: “Wite Out” means white flight, the attempt of whites to avoid any contact with the racialized other. Italians and Irish became acceptably white in part by asserting that they were not black. (“We were dark white,” Norton writes.) Norton refuses this solidarity via subjugation: “Sometimes I think I will spend my whole life trying to understand that mother, and Emmett Till’s mother. And my own mother, and the men who killed Emmett Till, and that lying white woman in the grocery store in Money, Mississippi.” Norton wants out of her family’s kind of whiteness—another meaning for the book’s title. “What, I wonder, is the right way to be white?” Norton’s book doesn’t give an answer; it’s not the kind of question that bears one. But she poses it and digs in.

Wite Out moves from Norton’s childhood in Boston to her adulthood as a single mother in California. She refuses to fully affiliate herself with her family. Instead, she finds community with other women, with other artists, with black writers. (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Memphis Minnie, and Fred Moten all provide epigraphs). She becomes a kind of mother to a seventeen-year-old black boy in foster care named Marcus. She cobbles together a family and she cobbles together a self. Wite Out, a hybrid of verse and prose that uses typography and spacing in interesting ways, is the record of this process.

“Looking through thirty years of notebooks,” Norton writes, “stitching, remembering, juxtaposing. Imposing order that isn’t there while you’re living it.” To construct a self—a white self or a black self, the self as poet and the self as mother—demands constant editing and rearranging. That’s another sense of the title. Self-construction requires revision; revision requires Wite Out.

ANTHONY DOMESTICO, Commonweal

Diaries, letters, and notebooks are the saddest forms of writing, really—the bluest. Unlike elegy, they don't know exactly when death is, and so you see a mind alive; you get to fall in love with how someone thinks and tries to be understood. Wite Out—Linda Norton's lyric recollection of the years between 1996 and 2016—is a deeply sad book, then, because of how marvelous the mind is inside it. A document of race, family, poetry and the receptive space—all the living that gets done—between poems, the book is animated with hard-knocked empathy and wicked humour. It is like sitting at the kitchen table of a friend you've fallen out of touch with, spilling years of hot gossip, life's stings and sweetness, thinking "why don't we do this more often?" Yeah, why don't we? you think reading Wite Out, why don't we care for each other while we can? '

LIAM CURLEY, Small Press Distribution

This book is so powerful, so naked and transcendent at the same time. It can be painful to read, particularly as it slows down your read to ensure you're not missing something. I'm on page 24. I already know the author's courage is going to be bludgeoning to me as the reader. Regretfully, I can't wait.

EILEEN TABIOS on Facebook

Archiving at the scene, Linda Norton pulls no punches. With empathy and penetrating wit, she asks difficult questions in Wite Out.

NORMA COLE

So excited to hold this book in my hands after seeing it develop in manuscript over years. Norton distills and distills her journals to a rare potency. Writer’s writer. Courage, humour, brains, incredible warmth. Wite Out is a masterpiece.

ALICE LYONS on Twitter

Wite Out is important for portraying the life of a white woman thinking about race and class and love and parenthood.

SUSAN SCHULTZ on Facebook

I'm going to talk a little bit about this magical book, Wite Out by Linda Norton, a California based writer who was born and raised in the Boston area. There [is]something a little 19th century about this book, Wite Out, in which Norton keeps talking about her own life as a memoir by talking about and telling stories about other people. In this book, there is a sense of a social world being the world in which we figure ourselves out. There's a moment in this reading where Linda Norton talks about reading 19th-century novels and how when she was younger, she just thought they were about people with a lot of time on their hands. But that now she really understood. Now having recently and in the book split from her husband, she was, she had a lot more sympathy with this, these ideas, the way that the characters ruminate about themselves. And the novel she mentions Middlemarch, which is a great novel about living with other people and thinking about a social world as a way of thinking about yourself. 

Wite Out is what I call a heterodox form, meaning a form that doesn't quite fit into any one box that announces itself with a difference because it includes several different forms. It includes anecdotes, journal entries, pieces of historical data, and poems as well. Within this book, there is a combination documentary impulse and the lyric impulse. I call the documentary impulse the desire to record facts, lists, notes to take exact note of what people say on what day they say it, and what is happening at history at the time that they say it. Scraps of evidence, the actions of compiling and collaging.  (By the way, Norton is a noted visual artist and collagist whose work has appeared on the cover of books by Julie Carr, Claudia Rankine, and others.)  The documentary impulse places what's historically timely at the center. This is one impulse and then the other, which we call the lyric impulse. The lyric impulse always returns to things as opposed to trying to record them in narrative or historical order. The book itself begins with a return to Boston, and there are many returns throughout. 

The central figure here in Wite Out is a single mother with a young child and then a foster child. And I would invite you to consider this not simply as biographically true, but as symbolically interesting in that it reinvents a vision of the family not as something stable and patriarchal, but as something mobile, improvisatory, potentially including others, constantly reinvented something more like Toi Derricotte's sense of family, which Derricotte talks about how and black families, people who have different, there's an expectation that people have different colors will be in the same family. And there is therefore an expectation that people who are not necessarily biologically related will be in the same family.

KATIE PETERSON, UC Davis podcast