... a sustained, uncompromisingly even-handed meditation.

Maggie Nelson, in taking on this most American of topics in On Freedom, is always alert to the conceptual primacy of constraint, even as she allows herself no little freedom of her own.

Nelson moves through knots of ideology on freedom via 'songs' of art, sex, drugs, and climate, drawing conclusions—some wild, some that readers might find regressive—that obliterate the binary of freedom vs. constrain.

It is a very serious and beautiful book about why ‘freedom’ has become such a vexed term, deployed so often in scenarios where it really means the opposite.

It is a necessary book.

Nelson, who’s written about everything from murder to abject heartbreak without (it would seem) flinching, isn’t flinching now. Instead, she commits to what Donna Haraway describes as 'staying with the trouble'.

On Freedom makes only passing reference to her own life and the knowing first-person narrator of the earlier books has tipped into a state of dizzy uncertainty, crowd-sourcing every observation, including the subject of the book.

... sparing but powerful testimony about her own path to sobriety.

It’s probably appropriate, in a book about freedom by one of our most radical and forward-looking thinkers, that the conclusions should be at once so adventurous and so unexpectedly old fashioned.

Its lyrical subtitle is an overpromise; the chapters are 'songs' exclusively in the sense that they have musical names...they are bits of straightforward academic criticism. They do not sing; they talk.

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).

Nelson can leverage her lyric sensibility to marvelous effect when she writes about people who matter to her, as happens sporadically in On Freedom. But the general absence of autobiographical narrative in the book inadvertently reveals the trouble with her dialectical approach. Her preferred method is one of synthesis and accretion, putting quotes and observations in fragmentary conversation with one another.

... elastic, imaginative.

While her intellect is the driving force of On Freedom, Nelson decenters herself to build a canon of radical thought with reference to artists and thinkers too numerous to name here. Tapping into her own experience lightly, if at all, she gets to the marrow of being.

Far less memoiristic than The Argonauts, On Freedom is more focused on cultural criticism and philosophizing, exploring its capacious topic through the frames of art, sex, substance use and climate change. Nelson's applications of these restrictions to her seemingly limitless topic feels savvy.

On Freedom is an academic search, peppered with viewpoints from all the sources Nelson has consulted—and there are many.

The essay on art pushes back against calls for art to contribute to social justice. The chapter on sex asserts the possibilities of sexual liberation against what Nelson sees as a current trend (which she links to the #MeToo movement) toward 'detailing the gruesomeness and pervasiveness of (hetero)sexual power relations.' In other words, both chapters primarily fight against restrictions instead of exploring new possibilities. The final chapter on climate looks outward, but only tentatively.

Maggie Nelson combines...gray areas with the complexities of our current moment.

Fans of The Argonauts' intimacy may feel locked out by this new book’s more academic tilt, but Nelson does find ways to personalize and concretize abstract concepts, weaving in her son’s love of trains, her wild whiskey youth and subsequent embrace of sobriety, and her growing grief as she immerses herself in the study of global warming.

... more academic, less personal (than Nelson's last book).

In the book’s best passages, her patient buildup in defining others’ concepts leads to some full, complex insights; in its weaker sections, Nelson hops from idea to idea or gets mired in the heady theory.

Although art, sexual freedom and drugs are more natural subject areas for Nelson, the section on climate change is, to my mind, the most edifying.

[An] expansive and sharp-eyed study.

Nelson's latest is more purely a work of criticism.