Maggie Nelson

"A series of co-written essays that set into motion expansive, mutinous, timely concepts, such as study, debt, surround, planning and the shipped. A difficult, beautiful, vertiginous, fortifying and enlivening piece of work that somehow makes the contemporary world, with all its horrors, seem worth being born into and living in, together."

"Hartman eschews a focus on the more well-known, violent scenes of American racial subjugation to focus on the terrors and inequities that structured (and still structure) the slavery-to-emancipation period and narrative. A critical book for anyone aiming to understand how unfreedom masquerades as freedom."

"This book brought me to poetry; I could never read it enough. Celan’s poems are a radiant reminder of the most desolate events that can attend humankind (i.e. the Holocaust, suicidal despair) and its most resplendent features (the near mystical possibilities of poetic language, of intimacy). “Single counter- / swimmer, you / count them, touch them / all.’”"

"Niedecker lived most of her life in Blackhawk Island, a remote and marshy setting in Wisconsin, where she scrubbed hospital floors and cared for her deaf mother while writing some of the most quixotic, minimalist, moving poems of the 20th century. I know many by heart, like this one: “My friend tree / I sawed you down / but I must attend / an older friend / the sun,” but I still wouldn’t want to be without the hard copy."

"I adore Henry James and yet freely admit to never having made it all the way through this one. I have a strong suspicion something truly critical to my life lies in the last 50 pages, and if I were alone with it on a desert island, I would finally find out."

"Another book that brought me to poetry, and which never seems to get old (and this despite the fact that T’ao Ch’ien lived from 365 – 427 C.E.). I consider T’ao Ch’ien a calm, necessary friend holding out a hand across time: “A thousand years may be beyond me, / but I can turn this morning into forever.”"

"Birth defects, ancient Chinese terra cotta figures, the history of clouds, burning questions about suffering, numbers, evil, and time — this strange gem of a book has it all. Each category of thought is a portal, and its structure is a thing of unfolding beauty."