Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . .A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal ...
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May 02, 2011
Jimmy
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It’s kind of cliche to say that you don’t choose the people you love. But I’ve been thinking about this recently, maybe because Maggie Nelson starts off the book with this point, that she didn’t choose to fall in love with blue (yes the color). The book continually repeats cliches like this without shame, but then takes it in a slightly odd direction (like being in love with a color) that ends up (because of its strangeness and forthrightness) being oddly effective in terms of getting us to re
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Jul 23, 2011
Zach
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This is a brilliant little book that does its best to defy classification. Part of it is memoir, looking back on an ended relationship while living in the emotional aftermath of it. What's interesting is how this is explored in tandem with a philosophical investigation of the color blue, and it is this exploration that dominates the 240 numbered section of the book. More specifically, it is about Maggie Nelson's love of the color, and how that love informs her understanding of other forms of l
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Jun 21, 2011
Kasey
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I read this just after finishing The Red Parts, and loved it equally much. In some ways--certainly formally--Bluets is very different, though it deals beautifully with some of the same themes--lost love and heartbreak in particular. I had a hard time choosing shelves for this book, since it's almost impossible to classify. Sort of poetry, sort of memoir, sort of neither and both. It's numbered paragraphs, really, that both do and don't link to and play off each other. Ostensibly, Bluets is
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Oct 16, 2010
Daniel
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1. Despite the tremendous lack of a fuck im inclined to give about the dual ostensible objects of this ...study? meditation? exposition? prose-poem? logical treatise?--the literal color blue and heartbreak--i found in its propositions a rendering of a received/perceived world that is, in profound and pleasurable ways, simpatico. I mean this in form as well as function, process and product.
2. Theres something particularly affecting and 'true-when-there-is-no-more-truth' about the (f More...
2. Theres something particularly affecting and 'true-when-there-is-no-more-truth' about the (f More...
Aug 19, 2011
Alex
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Segueing from her "The Art of Cruelty," not at all a dry tome, but certainly one with a semi-scholarly bent, to Maggie Nelson's "Bluets," yielded a sensation a bit like what might be felt upon visiting one's teacher's bedroom. Of course that covers a potentially wide range of feelings, depending upon one's relationship to that instructor; but here, I reference a certain element of startledness, as if one hadn't considered that the professional party consisted of such flesh, b
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Nov 07, 2011
lola
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Eight out of five stars, honest. I think this one's book-twin is Marilyn Hacker's Love Death and the Changing of the Seasons.
Edited to add: I am now responsible for SEVEN copies of this book being sold (I bought 1 for myself and 4 for friends, then 2 friends bought their own on my recommendation.) Not to oversell or anythin'.
Edited to add: I am now responsible for SEVEN copies of this book being sold (I bought 1 for myself and 4 for friends, then 2 friends bought their own on my recommendation.) Not to oversell or anythin'.
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Jan 03, 2011
Mark
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I agree with a lot of the previous reviews of this book and the descriptions of its form are more than apt. I read this based on David Shield's enthusiasm for it expressed in various interviews and in his book, Reality Hunger. I'm kind of surprised at how big a deal people make about its form. To me, the texts it most represents are, of course, Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet (or Autobiography of Red) and Dubravka Ugresic's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender--i.e., numbered diary-like entr
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Jun 22, 2010
Kathleen
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Maggie Nelson's Bluets is one, long, braided personal essay written using the thematic link of the color blue. (So stay away, ye readers who are intimidated by experimental forms of what is now termed "creative nonfiction.") Nelson weaves her meditation on the color, its symbolism, its importance, with her own break-up from her lover and her friend's serious car accident (and resulting quadroplegia.) It is hearbreaking, and interesting, and off-putting, and different, and incredibl
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Mar 26, 2010
Bobbi
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I like Maggie Nelson's writing but it's a bit much for me to buy into the premise at the center of this book which is her love for the color blue.
Here is the quote where I started feeling like the book's premise was too much for me to take. It's on page 14: "Acyanoblepsia: non-perception of blue. A tier of hell, to be sure--" Hell? To not see the color blue? Sorry. I've worked with people with terrible injuries and diseases, including complete blindness caused by war injur More...
Here is the quote where I started feeling like the book's premise was too much for me to take. It's on page 14: "Acyanoblepsia: non-perception of blue. A tier of hell, to be sure--" Hell? To not see the color blue? Sorry. I've worked with people with terrible injuries and diseases, including complete blindness caused by war injur More...
Jan 26, 2011
Moriah L
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I really love Maggie Nelson. I discovered her a while back when she was teaching at summer conference I attended. She liked the work I was doing at the time. She'd then only written her first two collections of poems, which were Creeley-esque and beautifully spare. Since then she seems interested in hybrid projects -- Jane: A Murder (which I am teaching to my students this semester) and this, Bluets. A poetic numbered prose meditation on her love of the color blue, the history and literary atten
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Aug 23, 2011
Kevin
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While there are some great fragments in this book--a meditation on the color blue in the author's life--I feel slightly unsatisfied with the end results. The more personal chapters (or fragments--there are over 200 of them) are the most revealing and the best--stuff about lovers, a paralyzed friend, her past--but I feel like she detracts from those parts with textbooky quotes and name-dropping. It seems like she even admits a few times a kind of fear about revealing too much personal stuff. But
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Aug 18, 2010
Pam
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am i blue? are you blue? what is blue? blue hoo. this book is about the color blue and the poet's extremeness about said color. (well, the book is billed as poetry but it is all in prose, though they'd not really prosepoems, more like single paragraphs with a lot of quotations; very anne carsony.) it is precious, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in an 'oh shut up' way. the sex parts are steamy but kind of gruesome. if you read this you will find out many fun fax about blue, like: the buddha st
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Oct 06, 2010
Erikaaaa
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This book (it's wonderfully hard to define--it's "lyric essays," it's prose poems, whatever) is intensely dramatic in a way that bothered me--plus I grow very weary very quickly of the (not at all shocking) use of "fucking" and the p-word in literature--BUT, she makes it clear she is aware of her self-pitying melodrama by heartbreakingly contrasting it with a friend's tragic accident. Plus I am similarly enchanted by the color blue, and her meditations on the color are often
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Aug 18, 2010
Laura Jean
rated it:
There are some books you need to read because they are on a list, or have been deemed exceptional, or have been sitting lonely on your shelf.
Then there are books you need to read because you NEED them, because you need what they say, how they are, what they do to you.
My friend Julie Kantor handed this book to me last night. She said, "You need to read this." I said okay.
I read it this morning; it is only 95 pages.
I wish I could explai More...
Then there are books you need to read because you NEED them, because you need what they say, how they are, what they do to you.
My friend Julie Kantor handed this book to me last night. She said, "You need to read this." I said okay.
I read it this morning; it is only 95 pages.
I wish I could explai More...
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Sep 08, 2011
Kate
rated it:
Beautiful, wonderful, wish I'd written it. Will read it again and again!
I gave this to an 87-year-old BFF for Christmas, having only read the first five or 10 pages. I was all like, "Marie will love this." Last week I picked Bluets back up... and oh, 11 or 12 pages in, began to encounter f**king. A lot of f**king. I pictured my 87-year-old friend reading this and thinking, "Katy thought I'd love a book about the color blue and... f**king?" I straddled the mortified/ More...
I gave this to an 87-year-old BFF for Christmas, having only read the first five or 10 pages. I was all like, "Marie will love this." Last week I picked Bluets back up... and oh, 11 or 12 pages in, began to encounter f**king. A lot of f**king. I pictured my 87-year-old friend reading this and thinking, "Katy thought I'd love a book about the color blue and... f**king?" I straddled the mortified/ More...
Jun 25, 2011
Eoin
rated it:
Masterpiece. This book is several kinds of impossible and almost totally unclassifiable. Through a numbered set of entries (stanzas? paragraphs?), Nelson works around the edges (and center) of her relationship with the color blue. As a point of reference, this work can be thought of as an essay the way The Pharmacist's Mate is a novel. I will now read the rest of Maggie Nelson's work. Worth it for almost any entry, plus can be read in a single sitting. Read it.
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Sep 21, 2011
Anna
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Her prose writing is beautiful, don't get me wrong . . . I just couldn't get into this book. All of her thoughts were so disjointed and vague, and every time the story would actually begin to progress in a direction -- every time a semblance of a plot would appear, in other words -- she would go on another tangent that had nothing to do with anything. That said, if you're looking for a book with pretty language and some good quotes, give this one a look. Just be prepared to be quite bored with t
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Mar 26, 2011
Ryan
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I feel like this book is the first really great post-anne carson kind of book. Like Anne Carson's Short Talks from Plainview became translated into a book that takes the color blue and goes on a long philosophical, meditative, and heart-warming journey. I read this book on an airplane and it was the best airplane ride of my life. Over 100 prosey-poem-y things, like little essays that all somehow related to blue. Some ideas thread throughout the book, like the illness of a friend. Really gre
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Apr 22, 2011
Dena
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prose poem/lyrical essay/study/meditation on the color blue and the pain of love - something in the book both brings you to the place where your heart couldn't hurt any more and your face is swollen with woe and then washes all that away. I wouldn't say there's hope here, but there's strength, and while this book is truly poetic, it also is infinitely accessible. Simply complicated. I have read it twice. It's on my nightstand to be read again. It's dirty and sweet and hot and meditative.
Jul 29, 2010
Megan
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i loved the nontraditional format -- thoughts presented in numbered propositions, as short as a line or as long as a page or so, as interconnected prose poems. and i loved the magpie-like collection of facts, quotes, and history related to the color blue, supporting a personal narrative or at least portrait. i'm someone drawn to the color blue as well, and it was delicious to live vicariously through someone who allowed a total commitment to the color for several years.
Jan 04, 2012
Lauren
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Pretty. So, so pretty. What fascinates me most with this book is Nelson's play with the raw emotional core at its center. She moves in toward this center, bringing the reader to look at it straight on, then she circles back out to the periphery. All the while the writing is just stunning. I'm so happy to have this title on my bookshelf, as I know it will come in handy whenever I need a "hit" of mesmerizing words.
Dec 21, 2011
Ben
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a lot of elegant writing on a sentence level, a lot of interesting observations, a lot of great quotes from famous writers and philosophers, and some neat facts about the color blue... but man, just so unrelentingly sad, maddeningly reticent (for a memoir), and HUMORLESS... like being trapped in a sad box for 90 pages... just you and the color blue and the word "fucking"...
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Mar 12, 2010
David
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Another book-length essay. The piece is constructed from 240 numbered paragraphs/sections. It's interesting because the separate sections allow the piece to meander without ever going off topic. Movement in this piece is incredible and fascinating.
It's going to be a challenge to work on my project without blatantly ripping off the amazing stylization.
It's going to be a challenge to work on my project without blatantly ripping off the amazing stylization.
Jan 14, 2012
Stephanie
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Nelson's courage and valiant despair sculpt her numbered prose poems into a philosophy and geometry of blue. Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Mickey Mouse, Joni Mitchell and Plato are put into the wavering conersational sea of guilt and desire. Between writing of pain and exposing pained writing, Nelson forms something half-dictionary; something approaching a poem's equivalent of a parable - expectations of blue.
Aug 31, 2011
Michael
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Like being blue--about which the narrator of this book is obsessed-- 'Bluets' is at turns bright and at turns dark, at turns light and at turns intense. In any case, the narrator's observations, and the prose in which those observations are recorded, are never less than captivating, exquisite.
Oct 20, 2011
Caroline
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Quirky, lovely, deeply mysterious but goes down easy. 90ish pages of short "propositions"-- in logical form, but defying both conventional and narrative logics, but mapping perfectly a certain movement of the heart, mind, and senses. This stuck with me, and I will read it again often.
Jul 14, 2010
Chris
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I'm not sure how to classify this little book - as prose poetry, creative nonfiction, or event fiction. A series of very short reflections (pensees?) on the color blue. Fairly graphic in places, as though Nelson, a poet, is trying to do Sharon Olds one better.
Jul 17, 2011
Levi
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Just finished this for the third time, and I really feel as though I could (and maybe should) read it every day, and it would never lose its luster, or stop revealing new depths. It so happens I have upcoming assignments to write songs inspired by both this book and The Time-Traveler's Wife (reviewed elsewhere), so it's interesting to read them both with that level of attention. Let's just say TTW doesn't really hold up. Bluets coincidentally covers some of the same territory - sex, love, longin
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Sep 16, 2010
Matthew
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Precisely rendered, section to section. Beautifully and playfully perverse when you least expect it to be. Look close and see the skillful weave of ideas. Step back and see the whole cloth of thought process. Damn this is good.
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Sep 12, 2010
D.A.
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In short lyrical paragraphs blurring the boundary between essay and poem, Nelson inhabits a color, using it as a landscape of inquiry. The result is both fascinatingly informative and deeply moving.
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