Like Love

Starred review from January 1, 2024
An exciting new essay collection from the author of The Argonauts and Bluets. Poet and critic Nelson draws from nearly 20 years of her career to create this perceptive and lively book. She pulls together conversations, critical essays, cultural criticism, and tributes to the artists she loves, including Bj�rk, Eileen Myles, Carolee Schneemann, Hilton Als, and Judith Butler. Featuring her direct and incisive prose, Nelson's examination of art and the people who make it is poignant and provocative. Her statement that "the art of our lives may not always be exactly where we presume it to be" is an assertion she demonstrates throughout. In assembly, these essays build a quilt of influences, friends, and loved ones. Nelson's admiration and enthusiasm for her subjects is a palpable driver of joy and delight. Additionally, the author possesses the ability to provide surprise and enchantment, and the chronological arrangement allows recurring themes to emerge and flow across the essays, creating an effective sense of a larger whole. Among the many topics Nelson explores are motherhood, pleasure, literature, violence, music, queerness, liberation, feminism, transgression, and, of course, love. Throughout the book, the author asks insightful, thought-provoking questions about the nature of art: "What does it really mean for a work of art or a body of work to perform a critique? Can images provide--and do we really want them to provide--'critique' in the same way that, say, discursive prose does?" In an essay on Nayland Blake, Nelson asks, "How does someone fully inhabit and model a space of generosity, good witchery, and 'niceness' while making decidedly 'not nice' work? What is the relationship between grimness and pleasure?" The true delight in this winning collection is tracking the development of various themes across years and topics. A revelatory gathering of beloved art and artists presented with distinctive prose.

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February 12, 2024
This sinewy collection by National Book Critics Circle Award winner Nelson (On Freedom) brings together previously published pieces about artists, literature, and the creative process. She reviews such novels as Samantha Hunt’s The Seas and Ben Lerner’s 10:04, marveling at the latter’s ability to inspire a sense of purpose in readers while envisioning a near-future New York City wracked by climate change. Other selections pay tribute to personal heroes of Nelson’s. For instance, “The Grind” celebrates the “mind-blowing, consensual, victimless perversion” of the Prince song “Darling Nikki,” and “The Reenchantment of Carolee Schneemann” expounds on how the theme of sexual liberation lies at the heart of the performance artist’s oeuvre. Philosophical conversations with photographer Moyra Davey, poet Simone White, and other artists meditate on creativity, desire, and shame; the highlight is a winding exchange with Björk about art’s ability to make “new things feel possible.” The variety of subjects and styles will hold readers’ attention, and few will be unmoved by Nelson’s soulful elegy for her friend Lhasa de Sela. Nelson describes the songwriter as an otherworldly, larger-than-life figure in intimate recollections of their high school travails, their eventual growing apart after college, and the devastation Nelson felt after learning of Lhasa’s death from cancer at age 37 in 2010. This is a masterful showcase for Nelson’s wide-ranging intellect and critical prowess. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
This penetrating and lucid collection presents the inimitable Nelson's (The Argonauts, 2015; On Freedom, 2021) conversations and essays about literature, film, and art. Originally published between 2006 and 2023, the pieces center creative works that Nelson loves, and that animate for her the "craving for connection that art conjures, frustrates, and possibly exists to satisfy." In essays on Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 (2014), the Prince movie Purple Rain, and Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst's photo diary, Relationship (2016), Nelson theorizes without pretense about the need for new forms of relationality, desire, gender, friendship, and much more. Every essay is a master class in close looking. Nelson writes that "the act of bestowing attention serves as its own reward," and that may be true, but these essays serve the art and ruminate on its lived value. In an essay on Matthew Barney's OTTO trilogy, she mentions that Barney "plucked" a book "off a shelf and took what he needed from it (as artists do and must)." Elsewhere, she encourages readers of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's posthumously published The Weather in Proust (2012) "to skim, skip, pick and choose." Nelson's own readers can here do the same, but why miss any of it? Like Sedgwick's, Nelson's insights are vital and sustaining.

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