More accurately, these are remembered words, subject to memory’s ebb and contortion, recorded in The Argonauts (2015), which precedes On Freedom, Nelson’s new collection of four ‘songs’ about art, sex, drugs, and climate change. Candid self-scrutiny is one of Nelson’s trademarks, along with her articulating the ways tenderness is enmeshed with the wilder beasts of fear and anger. The Argonauts’ blend of candid memoir and research helped popularise the idea of autotheory and dismantle ideas that academic thinking is a dense, fenced field inaccessible without the hard hat and sharp thinking of doctoral expertise.

The Argonauts won the US 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and became a bestseller. Expansive and lucid, it avoids easy answers, emphasising instead ideas of listening and care. This attitudinal openness is reflected in the porousness of its mode, tone, and genre.

Nelson’s work has always moved freely between genres. She wrote two books about the murder in 1969 of her aunt, Jane Mixer, who was a first-year law student. Jane: A Murder (2005) collects slivers of poetry, fragments of Jane’s adolescent diaries, white space, and documentary elements, while The Red Parts (2007) remembers the traumatic aftermath.

Bluets (2009) is a loose weave of lyrical paragraphs that Nelson calls ‘propositions’. The first – ‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color’ – opens an allusive, granular, and ‘somewhat novel and painful experiment’, tender stanzas exploring love and loneliness.

Trauma and freedom inform The Art of Cruelty: A reckoning (2012). This work of criticism examines a cultural landscape ‘glutted with images – and actualities – of torture, sadism, and endless warfare’, as well as the ‘habits of thought’ of their makers and consumers, in a contemporary context where the most pressing questions humanity faces involve reducing violence and hatred. Could there be ways of representing violence that ‘might deliver us ... to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative and just way of inhabiting the earth’? This question also shapes On Freedom.

The other strand of Nelson’s work is poetry – published, as with most poetry, quietly. Following the success of The Argonauts, Zed Press swiftly reprinted her three collections, Shiner (2001), The Latest Winter (2003), and Something Bright, Then Holes (2007). Freedom courses through these lean lyrics. In Shiner, ‘our limitations / couldn’t be fixed / with a hammer’ (‘Apology’); so ‘I propose / the axing of schemata’ (‘Proposal’). The book ends with a dream of release: ‘Stop performing ourselves and let the pith of us / hang out.’ (‘Subway in March, 5.45 p.m.’) The blade of the line break hovers over uncertainty, tenderness is spliced with violence, like the titular shiner collecting the luminous and bruised.  

A lover sends a skeleton leaf in the mail. To tack it to the wall will destroy it (‘Love #1’, The Latest Winter). How do we hold delicate moments? How do we protect love’s freedom – and our loved ones’ freedom – compassionately? How to avoid or repair the ‘total, desperate hell // Our failure to love each other well’? (‘Morning Prayers’, Something Bright, Then Holes).

In On Freedom, Nelson writes that reflecting on cruelty in the past, she discovered ‘to my surprise, freedom coming through the cracks, light and air into cruelty’s stuffy cell’. Drawn to and repelled by the word’s currency, she was galvanised by a ‘long-standing frustration with its capture by the right wing’.

This brand of freedom replaces activism – Gay Liberation, Women’s Lib – with domination disguised as liberation, exemplified by Donald Trump’s pussy-grabbing speech: ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.’ Nelson’s study of this ‘depleted, imprecise and weaponised’ word enacts a refusal to vacate the ground to ‘noxious forces’. She defines freedom not as a momentary achievement but as an unending present practice, crucial during what political theorist Wendy Brown calls a ‘crisis of freedom’.

On the campus where she teaches, Nelson encounters a student sitting under a sign: ‘Stop Here If You Want to Talk About Freedom’. She asks what he means by freedom. ‘You know, regular old freedom,’ he replies, ‘with a hint of menace, a hint of insecurity.’ On a desk in front of him lie buttons signalling his concerns, which include ‘saving the unborn’ and gun rights.

Freedom, then, acts like a train ticket, ‘marked and perforated by the many stations, hands, and vessels through which it passes’. Nelson’s method is to ‘pay attention to the ways in which freedom appears knotted up with so-called unfreedom, producing marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility and surrender’, and, as in The Art of Cruelty, ‘to expose how domination disguises itself as liberation’ and the way some versions of freedom (such as ‘inner freedom’) can be offered as a ‘booby prize for the powerless’.

Freedom and care are enmeshed with questions of time. Nelson writes about the artist’s ‘daily encounter with limits, be they of articulation, stamina, time, knowledge, focus, or intelligence’. For those disproportionately engaged in caring for others, the freedom to make art involves ‘figuring out how to suspend or offload the burden of caring’.

The section ‘Art Song’ looks at champions of freedom like the Proud Boys (who love ‘country, small government, freedom and fun’) and Milo Yiannopoulos, alongside Aruna D’Souza’s observation that whenever anyone talks about absolute freedom, ‘you know you’re in the presence of a straw man’. Nelson examines the potential of the left and right to curtail freedom, with different effects, considering the pressures of disapproval and cancellation alongside the impact of unacknowledged white and patriarchal privilege.

While you can’t sprinkle some magic ‘it’s art’ dust on an expression or object and expect ‘all ethical, political or legal quandaries [to] fly out the window’, Nelson believes in artistic freedom. She encourages adventurous work in her students – a punk or even revolutionary spirit, rather than mean-spirited or clichéd.

Being open to work that invites strong responses and defending the right to imagine, while being wary of urges towards ‘suppression, shaming or ejection as go-to’, does not mean tolerating work showing ‘a paltry or tone deaf understanding of issues’. (Nelson alludes to the infamous occasion in Brisbane when Lionel Shriver, donning a sombrero, expressed her right to imaginative freedom.)

Nelson’s essay ‘A Sort of Leaning Against: Writing With, From and For Others’ (Tin House, 2012) limns the syntax and dynamism of her methods. Starting with vulnerability, she extends this method into uncertainty that remains open to possibilities. She describes showcasing her ‘thinking-with-others’ and ‘weaving of mine and others’ words’ to create a generative space in which to ‘experiment, stumble around, live, and create’.

Nelson’s freedom songs are contrapuntal and choral, attending to knotty questions. Her mindful criss-crossing of binaries is at its most electric and joyful in ‘The Ballad of Sexual Optimism’. Yet if sexual optimism implies a ‘totalizing conviction that sex, desire, or pleasure’ is essentially good, Nelson rejects this, in part because ‘anything posed as an imperative … invites its rejection’. Retrospect can cast experiences in a new light, as Nelson’s discussions of her early sexual experiences, the testimony of Monica Lewinsky, and the evidence of ‘Grace’ against Aziz Ansari all illustrate.

‘Drug Fugue’ takes an abstainer’s vantage point to apply this assemblage method (Madame Bovary next to Charles Bukowski) to the question of drugs. Gender, pleasure, and escapism recur, though the results are a bit laggy, a dispassionate stance suiting Nelson’s mode less well.

‘Riding the Blinds’ frames the Anthropocene within the context of Nelson’s son’s love of trains, a contributor to climate change and the thing that makes him utterly happy. With a million species on track for extinction within the next few decades, humanity is commonly imagined as ‘strapped to a runaway train’.

The work of writing On Freedom, a ‘patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty’, suddenly seems inadequate. Her son may be ‘so bright-spirited, so resilient, so sanguine’, yet he will have to find a way to live with climate change. Nelson writes surrounded by ‘fire, fire and more fire’ in California during the pandemic, with its ‘freedom of not having to go anywhere’. While some consider climate change a hoax, a ‘plot to steal American freedom’, others navigate caring for the yet-to-be-born.

All writers have their hobbyhorses, suggests Nelson, and though freedom canters through her work, certain attitudes, she figures, might be hers: ‘openness, nuance, context, indeterminacy’. (She is also fond of lists.) At the end of The Art of Cruelty, she describes creating a space for paying close attention, for ‘recognizing and articulating ambivalence’, and On Freedom extends this.

These songs are about the ways things disguise themselves as one another, or are mixed, knotted, and enmeshed, especially care, freedom, domination and time. Motherhood flickers throughout the work and comes into focus at the end. If the word freedom is a train ticket, this book’s teasing out of the binding of art, sex, parenting, time, and care may be a station on the journey of Nelson’s work.

Publishing hype might position On Freedom as a sequel to The Argonauts. Suitably for Nelson’s work, it is and it isn’t. If these are songs, they are jazz-like, stripped of the linear melody that strings together the love poem that is The Argonauts. For a writer of Nelson’s powers, this stepping back from centring the ‘I’ isn’t accidental. On Freedom’s ‘thinking with others’ is choral, porous, sometimes gnarly, often open-ended. In a Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison described the power of ‘the complexity, the vulnerability of an idea’, since anything more certain would merely be ‘a tract’. Nelson’s complex, vulnerable writing similarly resists certainty as a formal expression and as part of the ongoing practice of freedom.