Fabric: Preludes to the Last American Book

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Cross-Genre. I love Richard Froude’s declarative, incandescently plain sentences, which at first seem like high-stakes non sequiturs, then a study in perfect, surprising aphorism, then a deftly woven web of profundity. The formal distillation and intellectual range of this book are impressive enough; even more so is Froude’s gentle but insistent touching on questions of God, mortality, war, memory, family, intimacy, and history. Froude sets up poetic shop in the fraught space between ‘terror and fertility, ‘ and wrests from it this exceptionally beautiful, intelligent book–Maggie Nelson.