Bluets was first published in 2009 in the US but, with the success of The Argonauts, her similarly unclassifiable bestseller of 2015, it’s now thankfully being released in the UK. But her friend “has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment”. She knows her own sufferings and those of her friend are incommensurable: “Is it a related form of aggrandisement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory?” she asks. The propositions that compose Bluets were collected across three years of slowly dwindling sadness, from 2003 to 2006, as Nelson recovered from a heartbreak while caring for a close friend rendered quadriplegic. Maggie Nelson calls them “propositions”, evoking pre-Socratic philosophical fragments or the Remarks on Colour jotted down by Wittgenstein in the months before he died. B luets is a meditation on love and grief an exploration of loss a reverie of blue a syncopated arrangement of 240 prose poems – at least bookshops often file it under “poetry”.
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