There’s fresh hell every day. Morning, afternoon, and evening we’re invited to look at something horrible, if we’re lucky; most often, this violence arrives without warning or consent. And that’s just the news. Art has its own knives and hammers, and it’s a long-held belief among many artists and critics that we the audience must be shocked into a better apprehension of our reality. But what do we gain by absorbing these blows? What can we learn by turning away?

Those are some of the primary concerns of Maggie Nelson’s book-length work of art criticism, The Art of Cruelty. In the past few years, Nelson has become a fan-favorite among the people who read this sort of thing. (Bluets, her singular meditation on romantic loss and the color blue, is often the point of entry.) She’s widely beloved, enough that there’s already some backlash—stray shots at her memoir of queer partnership and parenthood, The Argonauts; complaints that she’s actually not very radical, that for all her dedication to nuance, she’s got the same frustrating blind spots so many other whites do.

Amidst this conversation, there remains The Art of Cruelty,a book I find every bit as remarkable as Bluets for its curiosity, multidisciplinary appetite, and first-person perspective. This is Nelson’s taste, the idiosyncrasies and contradictions are never less than her own. For a young critic reading Nelson for the first time, it was especially freeing to watch her work so fluidly, with such a wide range of material, from Kara Walker to Sylvia Plath, Nao Bustamente to Karen Finley. It’s my favorite kind of model—the kind that can’t be replicated but nevertheless invites you to imagine your own.

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