THE PUBLIC GARDENS is noted in

The Kenyon Review's end-of-year book recommendations.

(Very nice company, including
Mary Ruefle, Jack Gilbert, Lyn Hejinian, Nourbese Philip.)

"Other books worth shelf space: Linda Norton’s cross-genre The Public Gardens: Poems and History, full of sharp and anxious writing, delivers on its title while dismantling the notion of autobiography. “All is possible / Sleep’s reason is neutral,” Lyn Hejinian writes in The Book of a Thousand Eyes, at once a serial poem, a collage of disparate thoughts, and a dream diary. The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry by Raymond Barfield snapshots the thorny relationship between art and inquiry, as does Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev’s less recent (1916) and, it seems, vanished volume The Meaning of the Creative Act. M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong! tests the respective allegiances of history and philosophy to morality."


Thank you to ANDREW DAVID KING for this mention, and for the interview he did with me for Kenyon Review last spring. You can access that interview here.


Click here for The Kenyon Review's complete list of recommended reading, December 2012.

NOT ENOUGH NIGHT; LOTS OF LIGHT

Check out the new issue of NOT ENOUGH NIGHT for ten of my collages, a poem by Fanny Howe, an interview with Gary Snyder, a talk by Alice Notley, and new work from students in Naropa's MFA program.