Book Review: Bluets
Kai Meyer | February 29, 2024
Maggie Nelson’s genre-bending collection of prose “Bluets” will move you into an ocean of feels. It is a profession of love, a reflection on heartbreak and the lens through which Nelson can explore new ways of relating, thinking and feeling.
The book digresses through numbered prose instead of having chapter titles. Like a rampant train of thought, it rejects being boxed into any binary or singular genre. Instead, the book functions like patches of a quilt that Nelson weaves together into conversation with one another.
For reference, this is how Nelson begins the book:
“1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a seahorse) it became somehow personal.”
Nelson draws on her personal experiences to ground the book, then abstracts those narratives through lyrical writing, which is rich with inventive, visceral imagery that naturally draws your eye across the page.
By simply numbering her prose, Nelson creates space for her ideas to transform right in front of the reader’s eyes as if we are going on the journey with her — and we are.
It is clear from the book that Nelson has just dealt with a breakup upon writing “Bluets”. Her fascination with the color blue is somewhat an immense love, an escape from reality and a reflection of her mental state at the time of writing.
One idea or association leads into the next, providing history, personal experience, or the work of other artists, Nelson somehow manages to create a cohesive throughline that subverts genre expectations.
The color functions as a means for her to delve into alternate worlds — Nelson explores every possibility of the color’s meaning, within her own life and broader society.
Nelson’s references to works outside of the book make the experience of reading very compelling, and oddly interactive. If you are constantly looking up the visual art or authors Nelson discusses in her prose, it feels as though you are also spiraling into this maddening love and obsession, right alongside Nelson. So, do not fear if you think a book about a color sounds boring.
“78. I once traveled to the Tate in London to see the blue paintings of Yves Klein, who invented and patented his own shade of ultramarine, International Klein Blue (IKB), then painted canvases and objects with it throughout a period of his life dubbed ‘l’epoque bleue.’ Standing in front of these blue paintings, or propositions, at the Tate, feeling their blue radiate so hotly that it seemed to be touching, perhaps even hurting, my eyeballs I wrote but one phrase in my notebook: too much. Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment. ‘From the mountain, you see another mountain,’ wrote Emerson.”
“Bluets” is a perfect book for when you are craving an escape into a new world or an abstract painting for that matter. Nelson’s writing is not only beautiful but cannot be found anywhere else. The book’s concept, touching on so many themes that Nelson was able to access through simply writing about a color — love, heartbreak, grief and more — astounds me.
If you are interested in creative writing in any form, I would highly recommend checking out Nelson’s work. A couple of her other well-known books are “The Argonauts,” which was published in 2015 and “On Freedom, Four Songs of Care and Constraint,” which came out in 2021.
“229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.”