The day before I met Maggie Nelson, I was on a beach thinking about her new book, The Argonauts, and a friend and I decided to draw her name in the sand. It took forever to take this picture because the waves kept washing it away, and I was reminded of Nelson’s mega theme: indeterminacy.
If you say “Maggie Nelson” to a certain group of literary people, they will get a faraway look in their eyes and start talking about how much her book Bluets changed their life, how they hand it out to all their friends, how they got this one tattoo because of it, etc. Bluets is a book-length collage essay, similar to Nelson’s new book, The Argonauts. A collage essay is essentially an essay in fragments—an essay with lots of line breaks. Something between an essay and a poem. Some people call them “lyric essays.” Nobody does the collage essay like Maggie Nelson. She cracked some structural code in Bluets that many writers are now trying to copy. But nobody gets it quite as right as she does…
