We get the first one early on: “I had received a phone call. Several high peaks occur through the book as well, which Nelson points back to throughout. Several plot lines move in and out of the book, appearing beneath the greater clouds of the loss, love and desire. Which is to say, for a book that might actually be an essay, which might be a lyrical essay, for a long work that “blurs genre,” she fills the requirement of what good poetry must do, which is deliver new ways of talking and looking and thinking, and helping us to look and think.įor instance, Manhattan looked at from within itself during daytime is “dank providence,” a man sings Joni Mitchell in “heartbreaking drag,” and on the worst days Nelson finds herself in the situation of “baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows.” It must be said upfront that Maggie Nelson could have worked this out as a book of poetry if that’s what she had wanted to do early on. So I stayed behind, and became known as the lady who waits, the sad sack of town with hair that smells like an animal.” I spit out the objects in a snaky blue paste on my plate and offered to help the police look for you, but they said the currents were too unusual. When I looked up you were escaping on a skiff, suddenly wanted.

Afterward, it was time for rough magic: to cast the spell I had to place each blue object (two marbles, a miniature feather, a shard of azure glass, a string of lapis) into my mouth, then hold them there while they discharged an unbearable milk. There was a dance underway, in a mahogany ballroom, where we were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love. “Different dream, same period: Out at a house by the shore, a serious landscape. The 240 untitled sections that make up Maggie Nelson’s Bluets fill with various puffs of Goethe, Wittgenstein, film theory, high gossip, plain-spoken confession, contemplations, delirious modes of confusion, postulation, post-adolescent diary-esque feelings (this is not meant as a pejorative), dreams, spells, criticism, and personal anecdote: In one application, written and sent late at night to a conservative Ivy League university, I described my project as heathen, hedonistic and horny.”

“I applied for grant after grant, describing how exacting, how original, how necessary my exploration of blue would be. “I had fallen in love with a color … then, it became somehow personal.” Long before Nelson began work on the book, she put on her CV that she was working on a book about the color blue. Bluets, by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2009) is a love story between a person and an idea.

Maggie nelson blue