Bluets
Maggie Nelson
Wave Books, 2009

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets starts with its worst sentence: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” I am suspicious of this sentence; I find it contrived. Everything else about the book I love.

Bluets, which is a prose-poetry hybrid (or, arguably, an essay), is written as a series of numbered “propositions,” like a treatise, and draws heavily from a list of sources cited in the back, including Wittgenstein and Goethe. (Nelson’s work may appeal to fans of Jenny Boully.) The book has three main subjects or themes: the philosophy of color; the analysis of a past romantic relationship; and the ostensible love affair (an emotional affair? unrequited?) with the color blue.

The third is often foregrounded, but it’s the least interesting of the three, or perhaps I should say the most annoying. But one can get around that by rejecting that first line as disingenuous and taking the “love” object for what it really is—an object of obsession. Or, more properly, displaced obsession, since the speaker increasingly seems to be focusing on blue as a way of avoiding the more difficult subjects of depression and loss. (I say “speaker” in deference to the common wisdom that the “narrator” of a poem is not identical to its author, but the speaker in this book does make frequent reference to the act of authoring it.)

The path toward this recognition—that the speaker-author is afraid that if she writes about her real subject, the words will supersede her actual experience, the way a childhood photo “replaces the memory it aimed to preserve”—is both fascinating and beautiful. It’s an inquiry into the very nature of color—a purely subjective experience that nonetheless falls under the purview of science—as well as a catalogue of the cultural uses of blue, in books, in pornography, in music. Nelson can write a lovely lyric line (“a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette”; “an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire”) but doesn’t stake her claim in metaphors and images. Bluets is built from ideas and questions: Why has so little been made of the “female gaze”? How long is one permitted to be “blue” before they must admit their life is simply ruined? (The consensus among her friends is seven years.)

These ideas and references serve as a string of jumping-off points for self-reflection and realization:

177. Perhaps it is becoming clearer why I felt no romance when you told me that you carried my last letter with you, everywhere you went, for months on end, unopened. This may have served some purpose for you, but whatever it was, surely it bore little resemblance to mine. I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day’s mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

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 the Romantic sublime.

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–Elisa Gabbert

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Poemland
by Chelsey Minnis
Wave Books, 2008

Chelsey Minnis is something of a poet’s poet, and to certain readers her third book, Poemland, will come off as undisciplined, even ridiculous. But to readers who want to be in on the joke, that is exactly the point. And it is, the book itself professes, “a very expensive joke,” but it is also “a fistfight in the rain under a held umbrella” … “a chance to tell the truth” … “crap coming toward you on a conveyor belt” … “a regretted regret” and “double everything!” Poemland is a book-length definition of what poetry is and what it does, a description through over-the-top metaphor (“This is meat colored candy”) of what being a poet is like. So those who hate poems about poems need not apply: “This is a long boring attack,” she writes. But for a reader like me, who dislikes description and similes in their usual context, this book is anything but boring.

Minnis’ trademark is the forbidden punctuation of ellipses and exclamation points:

You must have some sort of agenda to promote in poetry!

Such as self-sympathy or vengeance…

You must seduce and counter-seduce…

And glow with extreme sensual grievance…

Like an undeserved sunset…

This is part of the poet’s self-announcing form of subversion. Her poems are subversive, but they’re delivered in the voice of a naughty little girl who defies “god’s wish” by passing out on the “sticky floor” at “catholic school.” (This girly yet grotesque aesthetic helped spur Arielle Greenberg to coin the term “Gurlesque” in 2002.) It’s the voice of a girl who indulges in funeral daydreams: “If you die everyone tells a sad story about you! […] Do not die or everyone will continue to care only about themselves and not you!” This adolescent logic is later echoed in a snide dig at every grownup writer’s fantasy of living on after death through writing: “Death will come to end swinishness… // But my swinishness will continue in my poems…!” This is what Minnis excels at—teetering in perfect balance between the childishly vapid and the ultimately truthful. To write poetry, Poemland claims, is “to enchant someone meaninglessly.” And the book enchants with a long attack of self-contradicting truisms and glittering images of a bad girlhood.

– Elisa Gabbert