Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson Poems

Maggie Nelson Biography

Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She is the author of five books of nonfiction, including "The Argonauts" (2015), "The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning" (2011), "Bluets" (2009), "The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial," (first published in 2007, reprinted in 2016), and "Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions" (2007, winner of the Susanne M. Glassock Award in Interdisciplinary Scholarship). Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007, Jane: A Murder (2005, finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001). The Argonauts won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and was a New York Times best-seller. The Art of Cruelty, a work of cultural, art, and literary criticism, 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. Her 2009 book Bluets, about pain, pleasure, and the color blue, became a cult classic, and was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years. Her memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence, titled The Red Parts, is the second of two books she wrote about the 1969 murder of her aunt, Jane Mixer. 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 is generally described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, scholarship, and poetry.)

The Best Poem Of Maggie Nelson

Spirit

The spirit of Jane
lives on in you,
my mother says

trying to describe
who I am. I feel like the girl
in the late-night movie

who gazes up in horror
at the portrait of
her freaky ancestor

as she realizes
they wear the same
gaudy pendant

round their necks.
For as long as I can
remember, my grandfather

has made the same slip:
he sits in his kitchen,
his gelatinous blue eyes

fixed on me. Well Jane,
he says, I think I'll have
another cup of coffee.

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