PanLos Angeles Review of Books[Waldstreicher] offers a Phillis Wheatley ready for her TikTok close-up ... While it is not at all wrong to wonder whether the trauma of the poet’s Middle Passage sparked her drive to write so forcefully and so well, it is a question, not a certainty ... For Waldstreicher, bringing Wheatley to the present, to the modern reader, often paradoxically means talking about her poems in ways that would have been strange to Wheatley herself ... Wheatley’s poem is much richer than Waldstreicher seems to think it is.
