Maggie Nelson Knihy

In this whip-smart study, Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell.

The narrative recounts the life and tragic death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Her murder remains officially unsolved and is believed to be part of a series of brutal rape-murders in the area during that time. Born after Jane's death, Nelson reflects on the profound impact this event had on her family and her own psyche. The exploration unfolds through a blend of poetry, prose, dream narratives, and documentary sources, including newspapers and true crime literature, along with excerpts from Nelson's diaries from her teenage years. The work is divided into eight sections, detailing Jane's life, her murder, its investigation, and the lasting effects on Nelson's childhood and sisterhood. A trip to Michigan with her mother to retrace Jane's last hours adds depth to the narrative. Each section varies in form, with the transitions and surrounding white space creating fissures that challenge the sensationalism of the story, prompting deeper reflections on girlhood, empathy, and the complexities of another's life and death. This piece serves as an elegy, memoir, detective story, and a meditation on violence, expanding the boundaries of poetry and storytelling.

Tells the story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969, via a collage of poetry and prose.

This is criticism at its best.-Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

What can freedom really mean? In this invigorating, essential book, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience or talk about the concept in ways that are responsive to our divided world. Drawing on pop culture, theory and the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, she follows freedom - with all its complexities - through four realms: art, sex, drugs and climate. On Freedom offers a bold new perspective on the challenging times in which we live

Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 in the Guardian. 'Maggie Nelson's short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand... But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on' Observer. In 1969, Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a student noticeboard to share a lift back to her hometown of Muskegon for spring break. She never made it: she was brutally murdered, her body found a few miles from campus the following day. The Red Parts is Maggie Nelson's singular account of her aunt Jane's death, and the trial that took place some 35 years afterward. Officially unsolved for decades, the case was reopened in 2004 after a DNA match identified a new suspect, who would soon be arrested and tried. In 2005, Nelson found herself attending the trial, and reflecting with fresh urgency on our relentless obsession with violence, particularly against women. Resurrecting her interior world during the trial - in all its horror, grief, obsession, recklessness, scepticism and downright confusion - Maggie Nelson has produced a work of profound integrity and, in its subtle indeterminacy, deadly moral precision.

**AS SEEN ON BBC2's BETWEEN THE COVERS** A Guardian Book of the Year Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with--indeed, our inseparability from--others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture--from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis--is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times. -- Publisher description

A genre-bending memoir that offers fierce and fresh reflections on motherhood, desire, identity and feminism. At the centre is a love-story, between Nelson and the artist Harry Dodge, who is undergoing gender reassignment, while Nelson undergoes the transformations of pregnancy. Personal, honest and wide-ranging, Nelson explores the challenges and complexities that make up a modern family.

In this electrifying and raw debut anthology, Maggie Nelson unpicks the everyday with the quick alchemy and precision of her later modern classics The Argonauts and Bluets. The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles--syllabic verse, sonnets, macaronic translation, Zen poems, walking poems--to express love, bewilderment, grief, and beauty. This book, Nelson's first, heralded the arrival of a fully formed, virtuoso voice.