Bluets, a collection of prose poems ostensibly about being in love with the color blue, is very, very brave. The deepest bravery has to do with vulnerability. I don’t know the extent to which Bluets is autobiographical, but it doesn’t matter. Everything is plausible. Most of us have been in similar places of heartbreak and awe and incomprehension, and if we haven’t Nelson at least convinces us that such places exist. Other forms of bravery are contained within Bluets: the experimental format; the total lack of concern with one’s subject being well-trod artistic ground; the wrestling with sequence—specifically, the order of Nelsons “propositions,” the stanzas of the poem—as a generator of meaning. (Would other sequences reveal other meanings, holding the text constant? The definition of a mathematical set does not depend on order. Why are words so different?) I do worry that Nelson left something on the table, artistically, by not finally letting go of blue as a frame—the book transcends that need, I think—but I’m quibbling. It’s her life, her passion. We the readers are more than witnesses but less than friends, and the pace at which longing dissolves into light is Nelson’s business alone. 8
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave, 2009. Reviewed September 6, 2025.