Reading Like Love is akin to entering Nelson’s workroom to look at her maquettes, her conceptions in development, before we see them fully realized ... Throughout Like Love, Nelson is herself a poet of the question spirit.
The writing isn’t consistent, any more than her books are. But I like to take my thinkers and writers whole, as she does. The essays offer a kind of composite self-portrait, and illustrate how she thinks, sometimes painstakingly, sometimes with casual jubilance, about some of the central dilemmas of our time.
A scrapbook of still-fresh memories — miscellaneous, uneven, and indispensable ... Throughout the collection, Nelson risks imprecision to preserve her subjects’ ability to stay in motion, even if that means they elude her grasp.
