These days
the world seems to split up
into those who need to dredge
and those who shrug their shoulders
and say, Its just something
that happened.
While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelsons incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in
Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, andperhaps most frightening of allfreedom.
Events in Los AngelesAuthor event at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on February 3, 2019, TBAOutreach to book clubs and librariansTargeted media outreach to online literary blogs (Paris Review Daily,New Yorker,LitHub), podcasts (LitUp), and poetry publications (Poetry, Poets & Writers)Targeted media outreach to subscription services (BOTM), and excerpts/interviews in literary newsletters (Lenny Letter, Rookie)Before Maggie Nelsons name became synonymous with genre-defying, binary-slaying writing,Something Bright, Then Holesintroduced readers to a singular voice in the making: exhilarating, fiercely vulnerable, intellectually curious, and one of a kind.Praise forSomething Bright, Then Holes(2018)
Lambda Literary, New in June Roundup
Nelsons nexus is fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory. Those concerns are present inSomething Bright. . . But in this collection, Nelsons heady, narcotic philosophizing is underpinned by a more personal vulnerability. The Paris Review
Mlãœ