Maggie Nelson delves into the work and minds of other artists to create a deft and polyphonic book with multiple themes
Maggie Nelson writes about love and life, about tenderness, motherhood and marriage, while not shying away from brutality and coarseness.While I was reading Maggie Nelson’s latest book, Like Love, for this review, I went to hear her speak in New York. Reading Nelson is magical; hearing her speak is electrifying. It is clear to me – yet again – that she is one of the sharpest thinkers today.
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Nelson is delving into other artists’ minds in Like Love, but also delving into her own, as well as tangentially into adjacent conversations and communications with other artists. The result is a polyphonic assemblage, which in less capable hands could have become chaotic but here it is graceful and aesthetic, deftly crossing boundaries and definitions, a concordant symphony.
In her Q&A with Nelson, Darcey Steineke called Nelson’s writing “open-minded”. Nelson’s supple thinking is admirable in the way she cracks open binaries and draws out the ambivalences of any topic, be it reproduction, love, sexuality or the way we make and observe art. It is her willingness to be open to new ideas, to see the world in an interconnected, capacious manner, that pulls me in.
In her talk, Nelson emphasised the need to look for magic as we grow older, since magic isn’t as easy to come by. I found after listening to her and reading this unflinching meditation on how we live, that I was thinking more expansively and felt more alive to the potential of magic when it happens next.
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