RaveThe NationWhat I admire is her character and willingness to observe that which is hard to look at. In frank: sonnets, Seuss transforms \'tragic spectacle\' into something beautiful, visionary ... This collection is a catalog of contradictions. Seuss is vulnerable and direct in these poems, but she’s never naive and certainly not stupid ... The way Seuss writes is at times abrupt and devastatingly severe, and still unflinchingly romantic in every awful sense of the word ... Perhaps this is the reason I am so struck by Seuss’s work here: I admire writers who live as a comet, shooting by with \'nothing left to lose.\' You can’t make it through these poems and not be affected. They gesture around at the art of everybody’s lives.
Maggie Nelson
RaveThe Brooklyn Rail\"It is a necessary book ... It is flawed and of astonishing cultural significance and among the finest writing of her career ... much of On Freedom departs from Maggie Nelson’s penchant for the personal narratives of her academic origins (as in The Art of Cruelty)—in doing so, she launches spacious and probing inquiries into the theoretics of climate change; contemporary sexual politics; drug use, abuse, and disuse; and the ethical confines of art ... Her proposals in On Freedom are flawed, human, and cursory in the predictable ways I suspect make many of us nervous to read this book. To her credit, throughout these passages, she acknowledges her hesitation to approach the subject and anticipates forthcoming criticism ... demographically, she is out of touch with the vast majority of the country. But she never purports to speak for anybody else within these passages. And it matters that it’s her writing—she has something to say, lucid and brave beyond the imposed discursive limits of our time ... this is a generous guide that maps for us practical anarchies outside of and beyond our present culture’s imagination while encouraging us to continue to live in conversation with them.
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