Same things goes for this book – it’s entirely numbered ad takes the form of a specific physical structure – but after time it feels completely natural that it was once so unnatural. I didn’t notice until right now that a lot of my own room is blue – that kind of tacky Target-brand turquoise – but normally the first thing I notice about my room is that it’s cluttered, not that it’s almost entirely blue. You see enough of it, and you stop noticing it’s there.

Maybe she does this because that’s kind of what happens with color.Like the numbers are simply keeping track of the thoughts she decided to write down. The flow between each poem, even if the subject matter is different, is so well done that after all while you forget that they’re supposed to be poems and it just feels like you’re reading a journal almost. But, like I said, it never feels like a series of poems or a list of anything even with the numbers and spaces. It reads a lot like an essay, or a memoir, where the paragraphs are all separated by spaces and numbers for some reason. But the book never feels like a numbered lists of things. In numbered “poems” that feel more like blurbs of prose.I’m questioning the status of the book as a book of poems because it is written like so: Besides, Nelson herself calls it a book of poems, and who are we to tell the artist that their artwork is not art? Seems a bit rude to me. Poets feed off of the unexpected, the challenging, the irrational. Expectations are merely guidelines they decide not to follow. But what does “technically” mean to a poet anyway? Poets, by nature, or at least the good ones, the memorable ones, defy any kind of technical convention. This is a review of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a 100-page book of poems published in 2009.Īctually I’m not sure this book technically counts as a book of poems. Like when you need a book of poems to review for class, and at a party a friend suggests one to you randomly, you’re not even talking about poetry but she says “you should read this book” and she hands it to you and you’re not really into poetry but you do need a book for class, so you ask to borrow it, and when you get it approved by the instructor, she admits she has recently finished reading that same book (even though it came out six years ago) and her friend in the room pulls out his own copy of the book and says “I’ve been reading it too” and naturally it is approved and it ends up keeping a permanent space in your backpack even though you hardly have the time to read it.

It’s odd how the universe works sometimes, and things come to your life at seemingly perfect moments.

Maggie nelson blue