Drug Fugue is not much more than a tour d’horizon of addiction literature – included are Iris Owens’s novel After Claude and Avital Ronell’s Crack Wars – while the final piece, Riding the Blinds, is a kind of intellectual anxiety attack provoked by global heating, the solving of which must inevitably involve the loss of certain freedoms. After this, however, things get more diffuse. In the second, The Ballad of Sexual Optimism, her attention shifts to #MeToo and female desire, and the tension that may exist between them. In the first, Art Song, Nelson pokes at such issues as cultural misappropriation and the denunciations that now inevitably trail supposed “transgressions” by artists and writers.
What are these realms? The book comprises “four songs of care and constraint”: in effect, four essays (I struggle to think of them as songs, not least because their musicality seems to me to be gravely in doubt). Her text, then, will “bear down” on its “felt complexities” in four distinct realms.
Freedom is, she writes, often “knotted up with so-called unfreedom, producing marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility, and surrender”. Nelson has, it seems, long been suspicious of emancipatory rhetoric, language that may condition us to think of liberation as a “future achievement rather than an unending present practice”, and she has duly made this her new book’s guiding principle. I n her first extended outing since The Argonauts, a book that brought her many new readers when it was published in 2015, the American poet, critic and all-round deep thinker Maggie Nelson makes a concerted land grab on the much “depleted” notion of freedom, aiming to steal it away not only from the populist right, but also from the puritan left (puritan, I should say, is my word, not hers).
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