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alissa417's review
5.0
Oh my word, just the last lines - until then I want to be in, all in - all heart, no escape (ie living, committed to life, not living merely until the death march ends). Ah, what beauty. Everything here is timely, and yet has so much universality - meditations on care, what makes a good life, what true freedom even is. I haven't seen a work of this intellectual magnitude hit in a while that I had high hopes for commercially. I have high hopes for this one.
tweepunx's review against another edition
5.0
what a book. quite thoughtful and nuanced. read on freedom!!
mababab's review against another edition
3.0
the ballad of sexual optimism can be summed up more concisely in kim petras's "treat me like a slut."
breadandmushrooms's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.75
fran_gel's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
I really really enjoyed this book. Each section was different and thought provoking in each way, whilst a bit more theory based than her other books - it was still very maggie nelson in that it leapt all about the play and was more like peeking into someone’s thoughts (v well researched thoughts) - it was great :)
sam_bizar_wilcox's review against another edition
4.0
I like Maggie Nelson the theorist more than Maggie Nelson the poet. In this collection(?) she tackles issues of consent, climate, free speech, etc. in ways that I found both provocative and tantalizing. Her voice was a rather edifying one as I was finding myself nodding along to positions I might not have initially taken. More importantly, though, she treats those who have moral positions that slightly deviate from her own with intellectual respect and compassion: something to be celebrated in any corpus, but one where the topics can be so hairy as freedom is a true godsend.
I used Nelson in conversation a lot as I was reading this book, and I think there's a lot of fun to be had unpacking and wrestling with these ideas. This book is the sort of non-fiction that can simultaneously entertain through Nelson's clever verbiage, as it can also provide countless hours to puzzle over some of the ideas here. More important: she is accessible. Her scholarly repertoire is immense, but she scaffolds citations so that anyone from a Eve Sedgwick aficionado (I am not, but aspire to be) to your average Twitter leftist can parse through these interesting and difficult concepts.
Do I buy Nelson's ultimate positions on freedom? I'm not sure; but that isn't the point, I reckon. Rather, the notion of freedom ought to be dislodged from the contemporary conservative appropriation of the term and tempered, in some way, about how freedom might actually be applied equitably in a world faced with imminent peril and by communities to whom the charge for freedom has been a rallying cry against oppression (not a blunt tool, as it so often is by the right, to oppress).
I used Nelson in conversation a lot as I was reading this book, and I think there's a lot of fun to be had unpacking and wrestling with these ideas. This book is the sort of non-fiction that can simultaneously entertain through Nelson's clever verbiage, as it can also provide countless hours to puzzle over some of the ideas here. More important: she is accessible. Her scholarly repertoire is immense, but she scaffolds citations so that anyone from a Eve Sedgwick aficionado (I am not, but aspire to be) to your average Twitter leftist can parse through these interesting and difficult concepts.
Do I buy Nelson's ultimate positions on freedom? I'm not sure; but that isn't the point, I reckon. Rather, the notion of freedom ought to be dislodged from the contemporary conservative appropriation of the term and tempered, in some way, about how freedom might actually be applied equitably in a world faced with imminent peril and by communities to whom the charge for freedom has been a rallying cry against oppression (not a blunt tool, as it so often is by the right, to oppress).