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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. 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. Her newest book, Pathemata, or The Story of My Mouth, is forthcoming with Wave in April 2025.
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Reviews
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:
