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

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.

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 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. . . . “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

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

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. 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 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.

KATIE PETERSON, UC Davis

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, humor, brains, incredible warmth. Wite Out is a masterpiece.

ALICE LYONS