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Maggie Nelson is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her newest book is Pathemata, or The Story of My Mouth. She first published Bluets with Wave Books in 2009 - in 2015, the book was named by Bookforum one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years; in 2024, it was adapted into an acclaimed play staged at the Royal Court Theater of London. Her other nonfiction titles include Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015; named by the New York Times one of the top 100 books of the 21st Century), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). A 2016 MacArthur “genius” fellow, she currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
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Reviews
In trying to untangle the problem of her own pain and her experience of disconnection, she invites us to reflect on ours. In outlining her suffering, she prompts us to imagine our own. The singular as metaphor for the collective, urging us to fully inhabit the lives we have, in spite of bodily interruptions, or global distractions.
Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian
With subtlety and deftness, Nelson's writing is sensational in its stark and touching heft; facts are emotional experiences.
Godelieve de Bree, Chicago Review of Books
By making the problems of the cultural sphere her own, Nelson attempts to live with them without smothering them under the weight of her care. In this way, her criticism is exactly like love.
Jenny Wu, The Brooklyn Rail
It must be human nature to love secrets; it's certainly contemporary to love confessions. But Nelson is interested in more than mere confessions. Nelson is interested in looking and what it means to see the world and how that is or isn't different from what it means to write about it.
Jocelyn Parr, Brick, A Literary Journal
Bluets is a collection of words that keeps vibrating, that can never be worn out.
Peter Rock, The Rumpus
It’s been said that a great writer can turn any subject into an engaging book...this is precisely what Bluets, Maggie Nelson’s arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue, sets out to do, and it is alarming how much drama she creates from a subject so apparently simple
Time Out New York
I never feel satisfied with poetry that is wholly cerebral or wholly emotional, so I love that Maggie Nelson’s writing gives me a philosophy fix along with a hit of Romantic sublime.
Elisa Gabbert, Open Letters Monthly
She veers, she collects, she assembles quotes, she confesses, she wheels unsignaled between ornate preciosity and the uncluttered blunt.
John Latta, Isola di Rifiuti
The proliferation of ideas from these bits and pieces of carefully reconstructed information is stunning. Nelson deftly weaves acutely felt emotions into her intellectual musings.
The Blog of Disquiet
Reviews of books by Maggie Nelson
Bluets -
- Maggie Nelson’s CalArts faculty home page
Articles
- “On Color” (in Bookforum)
Interviews and Discussions
- The Poetry Foundation, with Wave author Anthony McCann
- BOMBlog, with Susie Deford
- Chaparral Review, with Kim Young
- Continent, with Evan Lavender-Smith
- Cecil Vortex, with Dan Brodnitz
- Here Comes Everybody
- A conversation between Maggie Nelson and Wayne Koestenbaum in The Poetry Project Newsletter
- Bookslut, with Genevieve Hudson -
Audio
- Maggie Nelson’s page on PennSound
- Reading from Bluets for LA-Lit
- CABINET reading, with CAConrad, Eileen Myles, Wayne Koestenbaum, and others
- Reading "poem for Harry" for The Poetry Project
Video
Reading at the Festival of Poets:
Reading at the Poetic Research Bureau's Life Sentences festival of epigrammatic writing:
