The Latest Winter

by Maggie Nelson

In this, her second collection of poetry, Maggie Nelson experiments with poetic forms long and short as she charts intimate landscapes, including the poet’s enmeshment in a beloved city—New York—before and after the events of 9/11. The poems of The Latest Winter are rich with wit, melancholy, terror, curiosity, and love.
 

Genres: Poetry, Female Authors, Nonfiction

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Aike · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/4 stars.
the future of poetry is worth a whole sky full of stars, - and I am not sorry I bought this book for that poem alone. (I want to learn all the sentences so I can take it with me everywhere and whisper it to myself every time I hate writing and literature and the whole stupid world surrounding it.)
However, the rest of the poems simply did not blow me away. I enjoyed reading them, I enjoyed the conversational feel they had, as if Nelson was sharing her thoughts unfiltered after too much wine, as well as the stream of consciousness of it all, how she connected images and thoughts to each other. Some sentences/poems were really relatable as well. I just expected more.
(I might add a star though, sometimes a bit of distance is necessary in order to determine if a book or poetry stays with you. And I might be unfair to the rest of the book because I love the future of poetry so much.)

[Florencia Rabuco Quiroga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Después de un milenio, lo terminé. Traduje cada palabra que no entendía porque no soy tan lectora de poesía, y menos en inglés, y esta era la primera vez que leía a Maggie Nelson, así que había que hacerlo bien. Valió la pena y hasta diría que ese ejercicio de lectura lentísima fue mejor.

Como no soy tan lectora de poesía no me voy a cuentear. En este libro hay poemas que pasé de largo, pero otros que son de esos textos a los que volvería una y otra vez, no tanto por su complejidad como por su asombrosa/escabrosa precisión para transmitir una idea, imagen, sensación, lo que sea.

Por poemas como "The Poem I Was Working on Before September 11, 2001", "The future of poetry", "Words to a Woman" o "Report from the Field" le doy 5, porque me parecen espléndidos, brutales; aunque hay muchos más con los que conecté un montón.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Latest Winter was the sixteenth book in last year's October poetry project. This is obviously early poetry, and I didn't like it as much as the more sophisticated Something Bright, Then Holes, but it had a Patricia Lockwood flavor I enjoyed. My devotion to Maggie Nelson remains intact.

[soph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will never tire of reading Maggie Nelson

[yoidivichon]

qué bueno q maggie nelson dejó de hacer poesía la neta

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicious and tight poems, paired this with a re-read of The Art of Cruelty had fascinating results

[Caroline]

“of a small life. Still I haven’t learned
how to die, but there’s time. I wake up
with my mind a naked magnet
about to be bearded with the shaggy lead
of my thoughts, I find it funny
that they come back to me as if
they’re mine, that sleep hasn’t washed
them away, blue-rinsed this litany”

it’s been years since I’ve read bluets, and I also feel inarticulate for a while after reading poetry unless I commit myself to writing an essay about it. reading a collection of poetry is experiencal to me, a reminder that my own thoughts can be meaningful. but I think I’ll try for you, Maggie!

“The Latest Winter” reminds that pain can be bawdy, winter can be sweet, friends can be bad lovers, and places can be good friends. That poets can be bored and maybe that’s when they write best. That you can write ‘I love you’ on a page in a way that can still surprise. I marked six or seven poems with hopes to revisit, and that’s the value of it all for me— a little written thing worth remembering!

[Elsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

very, extremely good.

[Grace Goble · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of hers but some really beautiful stuff in here

[Michael Fuhrman]

young and wild poetry! loved meeting her younger self

“Oh my friend it's a fine and fair fiction
And my god is not holding it at all
When I was 23, I thought I'd seen some things
The inside of a truck A madman Afternoon
sun on the bed
Suddenly I get it
You can suffer happiness too, for what it's worth
You can handle yourself gently”

[Piper · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5 Stars rounded up

[Carsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is dog eared on my bedside

[Eddus · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an intro to the poetry of Maggie Nelson, this was wonderful. The book is a strange trip back to the time around the September 11th attacks and the aftermath in America (the collection was originally published in 2003). The book gives us an insight into the confusion and tenderness of those times which seem very removed from where we are now.
The poems themselves have a lyrical, vocal quality as well as a longing which I found wonderful to read. At this time poets were still figuring out where to go next, still shaking off the formal constrictions of past decades/centuries and this collection feels like a step towards the freedom of expression we see in many contemporary poets. There were several stand out moments, lines which really made you pause. Really enjoyable, will be reading more.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It strikes me, looking back on this, how much my reception of poetry depends on my mood. I read this over a course of days and there was one day in particular when every poem seemed on fire to me, lit from the inside and lighting me up as I read them. But then the following days, finishing the collection, it was much more a mix, and even the poems which had caught fire for me before often seemed rather ordinary. Perhaps I will read them again in a few years and see where I land.

[Emmanuel · Rating 2 out of 5]

it's never good when you look at a half-read book from across the room and think all right, let's get this over with

[Jen Bracken-Hull · Rating 2 out of 5]

The exact kind of poetry I tend not to like. Intentionally cryptic in a way that sounds smart, but shuts the reader out.

[june · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4 (?) need more time but this was so good, be warned by the amount of some of the lines i highlighted and would haunt me for the rest of my life honestly so much was not placed here pa but god... maggie girl what the fuck

"Another
year wound
round us, and
you still made
for me." (fuck my chungus life malala...)

"pulsing incandescent piece of flesh
boneless loveless beautiful fish
cold fucking fish

we say we have a romantic friendship
but all that means is I don't understand
anything I feel, for years I thought
when we touched it would be perfect
but I had to make you stop, you were
so much rougher than I thought." + so much lines from "Words to a woman"

"it's
true, I really am

verbose for
you, I have known
all along that
words will not do.

I am apart in a
made-up way."

"I want you to know
I conducted a war for this,
a war to lose my life. I lost it,
I lost it. I reduced it to
a death canoe
and still it came out
as life."

"What's not to like about that?
he asks. I am licking the air
open-mouthed just as you do
when you play your instrument.
Yes the dissonance is truth,
whether it is killing me or not
is not relevant, as I am trying
to write without knowing
who I am."

"I am not sure i know how to love
anyone. sometimes I think there's real cruelty
in space, sometimes in my greedy little hands.
I want to think the end of everything will be
a relief, but I don't really want humans
to fail."

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joint review with Shiner:
Maggie Nelson's 'Shiner' and 'The Latest Winter, her two first poetry collections from 2001 and 2003 respectively, newly republished in 2018 by Zed Books, are the final two books l've read in 2018, and remind me why I loved reading three of her other books so much last year ('Bluets', 'The Red Parts' and 'The Argonauts'); her distinctly direct approach to language, her natural rhythms and ability to harbour the deepest intensities, permeate even her earliest writings, concerned as they are with love and grief and sickness and existentialism and terrorism (one collection pre-9/11, the other shortly after). 'Shiner' is heat and blood and closeness, while 'The Latest Winter' is cold and weather and distance, both in their own ways exploring the self amidst the sprawl of New York, first in a tone of self-discovery, then with a sense of loss and being overwhelmed. There are too many poems and lines to single out, so I'll stick to one: 'my life as an exchange student' from 'The Latest Winter', in which Nelson writes "those were the days of pepper trees, when / I was unsure if anyone would ever love me".

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A lot of the poems in this collection were hit or miss for me. The great ones were really great & the unmemorable ones were just that. This isn’t a bad collection by any stretch, it just wasn’t entirely for me.

The jacket also made it seem like these poems were going to be a little more explicitly about NYC in the aftermath of 9/11. While that was certainly an undercurrent running through the book, I went into this expecting something more overt which influenced my overall opinion of the collection.

Either way, I love Maggie Nelson! I love her work, & will continue to read her in the future.

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little collection of tight poems has much of the same pull as Bluets, which I suspect is the viaduct for a lot of the people drawn to this book. I appreciate Maggie’s incisive vocabulary and expansive line breaks. It’s the kind of poetry that almost has tool marks from its making. You can watch as the poems unfold themselves on the page just as they were meant to.

As for material, as in other collections of her’s, the poems amble along a humdrum path that Maggie manages to coat with a bit of magic and insight.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first time I've read Maggie Nelson's poetry. I read /Bluets/ first and then /The Argonauts/, but I was just as happy with Maggie Nelson's poetry as I am with her prose. Her prose reads like poetry anyway and the way she can capture a moment or a feeling that seems commonplace and make it beautiful with language makes me want to go back and reread every poem, just to enjoy them again.

[Kendra Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading The Latest Winter and felt disconnected...from the poetry, from the imagery, from it all. I said as much to my coworker. She was flabbergasted. "But I love Maggie Nelson," she said, looking at me askance. I decided to keep at it. And maybe it was the releasing of expectations or a gift from the universe for my dogged perseverance... but the next time I picked up The Latest Winter, I fell in love. Hard. It's gorgeous and wrenching. And now my copy is beloved and dog-eared.

[karina · Rating 5 out of 5]

anna lent me this. ive been taking it around with me so gingerly since it’s not mine and it has my favorite cover of 2024 (if not ever). it’s very early-naughts in a way that reminds one of 9/11. but it is eerily timely and also reminds one that new york will always be bizarre, israelis always evil, and the seasons always influencing how it feels to fall in love. restored something in me about nelson since i had a hard time reading those essays she published last year :/

[elestanquequehabla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ay, amo mucho a Nelson, pero me pasó que el imaginario de amor y trauma en estos poemas se me va diluyendo a ratos. Como que capta grandes ideas e imaginarios en algunos poemas, y en otros simplemente plantea rollos que llegan hasta ser vacíos. Si bien este contraste podría funcionar, a mí me generó que algunos poemas pasaran un poco sin pena ni gloria.

[Thomas Rasmussen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fuld af små lyn og skarpe håndbremsevendinger.

Skrevet lige efter 9/11 - og det trænger igennem overalt... væver sig sammen med kendte Nelson temaer.

Hun er sgu god - og hun er blevet bedre og bedre. Synes jeg.

[Chelsea · Rating 3 out of 5]

“You wanted me to be/overwhelmed by magnolia/and so I was, fat white buds/perched/like flocks frozen/a moment before flight/It’s spring, you whispered/She’s going to be alright” (The Earth in April 74)

[Mia Sitterson]

maggie nelson’s poetry makes much more sense post- saturn return (the latest winter) than it did pre- (the shiner)

from here, the argonauts is on another planet altogether

keeping this in mind for personal reasons

[Malachy Moran · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times personal, at times apocalyptic. I found myself caught up in the imagination and imagery of this collection. I don’t know where she pulls these ideas from, but wherever it is in an incredible, and maybe a touch melancholy, place

[Nicky Enriquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maggie Nelson makes you feel all the feels unexpectedly with the most precise, sharp words.

[Michael Denham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthwhile read, although not as compelling as (and perhaps a little more cryptic than) Bluets.