5/31/2023 0 Comments Bluets nelson![]() ![]() Despite its picking itself apart, Bluets wears its hybrid/fragmented dress well, showing its seams and much enthralled by its wanderlust, an aesthetic runway that constantly leads Nelson to find new ideas, images, and expressions. The book is a philosophical and personal exploration of what the color blue has done to Nelson. As she crisscrosses sorrow and wonder, doubt and desire, her tone darkens. Nelson combines spiritual inquiry with erotic obsession, searches for beauty and gets hung up on memories. ![]() Subjects include an ex-lover and a friend who’s been paralyzed, but the majority of the text features her analyzing her reading, often deferring to others’ comments (including Leonard Cohen, Joseph Cornell, and Joan Mitchell) on blue: She’s not the only one so smitten by the color. Nelson utilizes memoir, philosophy, quotation, analysis, scientific exposition and query, meditation, and more, each in stylistic miniature. The themes of lost love and existential aloneness come to dominate, bathed in a kind of blued longing. The work hybridizes several prose styles and verges on the lyric essay. The book totals some nineteen-thousand words. Each numbered fragment is either a sentence or a short paragraph, none longer than two-hundred words. ![]() It is a set of two-hundred-and-forty loosely linked fragments. The author Maggie Nelson, born in 1973, has authored half-a-dozen books, among them poetry collections, memoirs, and nonfiction. Now, Where Was I? On Maggie Nelson's "Bluets" ![]()
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