Weeks 6–7: Maggie Nelson's "Bluets"

I am certainly not the only person to be blown away upon first encountering Maggie Nelson's Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) — an unassuming, slight book of tiny prose fragments whose minimalisms disguise an intoxicating complexity — and I hope your reaction will be similar to mine.

"Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color," the book begins, "Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excre­ment coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became some­how personal." Thus we likewise begin our journey alongside Nelson through her love affair with the color blue, a process she tells us happened "as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay un­der and get out from under, in turns," over the course of 240 brief number prose vignettes.

Along the way, she'll consider the color and its wider implications through a number of frames — from literature to the fine arts, music to film, philosophy to psychology,  science to religion, medicine to geography — all the while remaining deeply-rooted in Nelson's own personal experiences. In one regard, this is a book with a singular focus, but in reality that specificity merely serves as the nexus for an exploration of incredible breadth.

By the same token, as the central model for the sort of writing you'll be doing later in the term, I hope that the ambitious flexibility of Nelson's form will serve you as well as it does her in Bluets.

Here's our reading breakdown for our week with Bluets (n.b. the numbers here refer to the book's individual sections, not pages):

• Friday, Feb. 17: sections 1–89
• Monday, Feb. 20: sections 90–164
• Wednesday, Feb. 22: sections 165–240

And here are some supplemental resources related to the text:

• PennSound's Maggie Nelson author page — which houses two readings in which Nelson reads selections from Bluets
• Rob Schlegel reviews the book for Jacket2
• Gina Myers reviews the book for Bookslut
• Thomas Nelson discusses the book for Triquarterly
• Katie Schmid discusses the book on The Rumpus
• Charlotte Shane reviews the book for The Hairpin