Reading Homesick for Another World isn’t unlike the experience of walking through a Diane Arbus retrospective. In Susan Sontag’s words, Arbus’s work “chooses oddity, chases it, names it, elects it, frames it, develops it, titles it.”

To take art as seriously as La Rocco does in her criticism is taxing. When “reality” intervenes—economic reality, social reality, the tedium of competing egos—the fall is hard, which leaves her wondering: What’s the point? In her poems and creative essays, uninhibited by the demands of speaking as a disinterested authority, La Rocco takes on the big-picture questions that trouble her—What’s the use of art and criticism? How can any of it survive? Why do we care?