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?