PositiveThe Boston Globe\"Nelson moves through knots of ideology on freedom via \'songs\' of art, sex, drugs, and climate, drawing conclusions—some wild, some that readers might find regressive—that obliterate the binary of freedom vs. constrain ... Four cerebral essays comprise a text that the reader must stay with in order to allow any personal consensus on freedom to coalesce ... Nelson’s final \'song\' on climate, \'Riding the Blinds,\' gives On Freedom its clearest ring in terms of message ... Leaving off on this note clearly marks On Freedom as a rallying cry for constraint, the shadow of which then falls backwards over the previous chapters ... Nelson’s discussions of art and sex land with less finality, and in these chapters Nelson’s irritation with the current discourse is difficult to ignore ... I imagined her rolling her eyes every time she typed out a current talking point to prove she was caught up on the script before advancing her own more nuanced analysis ... Nelson makes a strong case for recalculating our positions on freedom with her own guiding principles ... These lessons are well received, but not until the third song, \'Drug Fugue,\' did I recognize the joyous version of Maggie Nelson with her deliciously reckless-seeming record of thought ... On Freedom proves that Nelson continues to do us a great service as a critic, which is to herself digest, and sometimes wrestle with, copious amounts of literature and theory, some of which is infuriating to read (Paul Preciado, Jacques Derrida, et al.), and to integrate this material into a relatively short book, in an accessible, felicitous voice all Nelson’s own.
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