Poetry. "Michael Scharf has produced a carefully unbeautiful and tough-minded meditation on the meaning of the word "freedom" in the years after 9/11, a ventriloquistic tour de force that recreates the paranoia of high theory, the detournements of downtown, and the panicky helplessness that expressed itself by the endless inventorying of loss, of death, of corporate and material conditions. But it is ventriloquism, a commentary on the inside as well as the outside of that moment. It is what Debord might have written if Debord had had a sense of humor. But though the moral laminate of irony is thick, experientially, and in the perverse end, this bristly and formally imaginative prose object is honest, tender, and beautiful"--Louis Menand.
