Praise for At the Center of All Beauty from Jane Hirshfield

Praise for At the Center of All Beauty from Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield recommends At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life by Fenton Johnson (W. W. Norton & Company). “With the originality, clarity, and eloquence familiar from Fenton Johnson’s earlier books, this book in defense of solitude arrived in March 2020, right into the start of a world suddenly changed into ‘pause’ and social distance. Anyone already of solo contemplative leanings will find in its pages an affirming companion. I say this without irony: solitaries are not misanthropes, nor cut off from the larger fabric of human and beyond-human connection. For readers coupled, knitted into the life of family, Johnson opens a view into a different set of choices in this articulate recording and witnessing of what it is to be born into an earth of many beings and of many ways of being.”