Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Book review by: Christina O.

Favorite Quotes: “They do not need to be bluets any longer. They are American, they are shaggy, they are wild, they are strong. They do not signify romance. They were sent by no one in celebration of nothing. I had known them all along.”

The first time I read Bluets, I couldn’t finish it. Not because it was hard to read, or dull, or difficult to follow (it’s the opposite of all of those things), but because I wasn’t ready for it. Like it or not, this is a book that teaches you about yourself. All people bury certain dark times inside them, and Bluets brings everything you’ve carefully hidden to the surface. It’s a book that “gets” you in a way that can be way unnerving and uncomfortable, but also invaluable.

Whether you look at it as a fragmented essay or a collection of interlocking poems that tell a larger story, Bluets is an unnamed narrator’s reflection on her two great loves: the color blue, and her most recent ex-lover. The narrator plays an enthralling game of cat and mouse, alternating between thought provoking ruminations on blue and slow revelations about the nature of her ended relationship. The details that she drops about her ex-lover seem accidental, which only makes the reader more intrigued. Every time the narrator lets her guard down and mentions the relationship, she immediately recognizes that she’s done so and retreats back into the comfort and safety of her blue musings. These notes on color are partly her own and partly an amalgam of the words of famous authors, philosophers, artists, and musicians. They’re sometimes poetic, sometimes dry, but always fascinating.

Maggie Nelson has an innate ability to put the darker side of the emotional spectrum into precise words. She takes abstract feelings and raw sensations and somehow manages to word them so simply that you don’t understand how you’ve ever viewed them any other way. It’s a book that deeply humanizes grief, tragedy, mental illness, and broken hearts. By the time you’ve gotten a few pages in, it feels as though Nelson has crawled inside your brain, made herself comfortable, and started reading Bluets in a hushed little voice that somehow manages to seep through you from your head to your toes.

booknectar tip: Buy it. Read it. Love it. Read it again. And expect to do a lot of curious googling, because many of the literary works that Nelson mentions in passing will inspire you to go hunting for more information.