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Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, scholar, and nonfiction writer. She is the author of five books of nonfiction, including The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and was a New York Times best-seller; a landmark work of cultural, art, and... show more



Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, scholar, and nonfiction writer. She is the author of five books of nonfiction, including The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and was a New York Times best-seller; a landmark work of cultural, art, and literary criticism titled The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011), which was featured on the front cover of the Sunday Book Review of the New York Times and named a NY Times Notable Book of the Year; the cult classic Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), which was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years; a memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence titled The Red Parts (originally published by Free Press in 2007, reissued by Graywolf in 2016); and a critical study of painting and poetry titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa, 2007; winner, the Susanne M. Glassock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship). Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001). She has been the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. She currently directs the MFA Creative Writing Program in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles.

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Community Reviews
Nicole Reads
Nicole Reads rated it 6 years ago
"I knew it all along. The heart of the world is blue."(p. 90) This wasn't what I expected.I’m feeling a bit like a prude but this was unexpectedly vulgar for me? I came in thinking it would be about the color blue, grief, lovesickness, love, loss, etc. Those elements are present but so is a lot of m...
Folding Paper & Spilling Ink
Folding Paper & Spilling Ink rated it 6 years ago
Nelson's collection is divided into three distinct sections, but almost all of the poems included have a sense of vulnerability and melancholy. There is a focus on loss - lost love, lost mobility, lost time - the wreckage of broken relationships, hearts, and bodies. The first section, field journals...
philoSophie
philoSophie rated it 7 years ago
Τα αντιθετικά πλέγματα που υποβάλλει η κοινωνία στο άτομο (μητρότητα-σεξουαλικότητα, άνδρας-γυναίκα) συνυπάρχουν, ή προσπαθούν να συνυπάρξουν, σε ένα αρμονικό σύνολο, με τη γραφή της συγγραφέως να προσεγγίζει το φάσμα ταυτοτήτων, σεξουαλικών και μη, συνδιαλεγομένη με φιλοσόφους και ψυχολόγους, αλλά ...
Lillelara
Lillelara rated it 7 years ago
The Red Parts tells the story of Maggie Nelsons aunt Jane, who has been brutally murdered in 1969. 35 years after her death the real perpetrator has been caught and an arrest is about to happen (prior to this the death of Jane Mixer has been attributed to the "Michigan Murder" killer). Nelson takes ...
Fangirl Moments and My Two Cents
Fangirl Moments and My Two Cents rated it 7 years ago
I just started reading this without getting any type of information or backstory. I felt lost for a bit. It was hard for me to follow what she was talking about sometimes because it skips around different topics continually. It felt kind of like a diary entry or something to me sometimes. After I...
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