About this item
These daysthe world seems to split upinto those who need to dredgeand those who shrug their shouldersand say, It's just somethingthat happened.While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson's incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes. Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital room of a friend, Nelson charts each emotional landscape she encounters with unparalleled precision and empathy. Since its publication in 2007, the collection has proven itself to be both a record of a singular vision in the making as well as a timeless meditation on love, loss, and -- perhaps most frightening of all -- freedom.
About the Author
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, scholar, and nonfiction writer. In 2016 she was received a MacArthur "genius" grant. She is the author of five books of nonfiction, including The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015) , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and was a New York Times best-seller; a landmark work of cultural, art, and literary criticism titled The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011) , which was featured on the front cover of the Sunday Book Review of the New York Times and named a NY Times Notable Book of the Year; the cult classic Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) , which was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years; a memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence titled The Red Parts (originally published by Free Press in 2007, reissued by Graywolf in 2016) ; and a critical study of painting and poetry titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa, 2007; winner, the Susanne M. Glassock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship) . Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) , Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir) , The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003) , and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001) . She has been the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
