Library Book Club

All experience levels are welcome to a monthly book group moderated by library staff. In 2013, the library will ask individuals from varied backgrounds to select a title that has been meaningful to them. Space is limited to 15 participants. Please register in advance by emailing [email protected].

September’s curator, Christy LeMaster, selected Maggie Nelson’s Bluets for the following reasons:

“You could argue that Bluets isn't poetry at all, but Maggie Nelson doesn't much care either way. It certainly is a poetic treatise on the physiology, philosophy and psychology of blueness and through exquisitely crafted metaphor, heartbreak itself. Bluets is actually a slow dissipation of heartbreak. In dismantling the larger idea of blue, Nelson parcels out an overwhelming loss, methodically, into small manageable chunks: some history, some science, some memory, some confession. This is how this thing works and this is how you will let it go. It seems as if she is burning each numbered bit as she writes it. Bluets, while a thin volume, exercises a rare potent affinity. She doesn't hide the tough parts. Rather Nelson puts her sadness, obsession, rejection, curiosity, humor and longing to feel better all on the page, with steely confidence we will know exactly what she is talking about.”
 
Christy LeMaster is the founder and director of The Nightingale, a cinema located in Chicago's Noble Square neighborhood, and is currently working on a global microcinema directory called splitbeam.org.