Kirjahaku

Before Maggie Nelson’s name became synonymous with such genre-defying, binary-slaying writing as The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty, this collection of poetry introduced readers to a singular voice in the making: exhilarating, fiercely vulnerable, intellectually curious, and one of a kind. These days/the world seems to split up/into those who need to dredge/and those who shrug their shoulders/and say, It’s just something/that happened. While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson’s incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and?perhaps most frightening of all?freedom.

Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Jane s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche. Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related true crime books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, and fragments from Jane s own diaries written when she was 13 and 21. Its eight sections cover Jane s childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson s girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane s sister) to retrace the path of Jane s final hours. Each piece in Jane has its own form, and the movement from each piece to the nextalong with the white space that surrounds each fragmentserve as important fissures, disrupting the tabloid, page-turner quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another s life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence (and serial, sexual violence in particular), and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can dowhat kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them."