Reissue of Maggie Nelson's Something Bright, Then Holes Is an 'Intricate and Specific Color Portrait'

Maggie Nelson's poetry collection, Something Bright, Then Holes, originally published in 2007, was reissued this year by Soft Skull, and we'd be remiss to miss a review of the book in the September issue of The Brooklyn Rail, penned by Elizabeth Block. "...[I]nspired by Annie Dillard’s observations on the impulsive nature of seeing, Nelson’s 2018 reprint provides precise evidence of her singular and true innovation in content, form, and timeless(ness). It drops controlled dollops of poetic meter, rhyme, and lyricism," writes Block. More:

Nelson begins with a one-page introductory poem. Although it begins on Annie Dillard’s phrase (the title of the book), I feel like I am reading a compressed version of Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck in one swift moment. Smash cut to Gowanus Canal (The Canal Diaries), a what the what to most non-New Yorkers (or once New Yorkers). It is quite a stunning leap, yet the understatement of visual observation makes sense in terms of the subject of the canal in relation to the book’s original history and contemporary transformation of the canal via Brooklyn gentrification. Nelson’s portrait of her intimate relations can neither be separated, as her personal reflection is not separate from her act of seeing/experiencing the canal landscape around her.

The new publication itself is an experimental subjectivity, which reverberates on so many levels. The book is a kind of beautiful “grotesque” landscape photography Diane Arbus may have chosen had she been a landscape photographer. Nelson cites Arbus, “Then I began to get terribly hyped on clarity.” Reprinted at this time, the book becomes an intricate and specific color portrait, dependent upon awareness of analog and digital chromatics (the past and the present), Nelson’s constant employment of blue and green (and bright light) as metaphorical mixture of natural and chemical (toxic canal, unnatural landscape). Blue, in her prior book Bluets, is a color Nelson has explored deeply in reference to the painter Joan Mitchell (and others), the loss of love, the meaning of existence. Blue here is also “mercurial” in two of its definitions...

Read on at The Brooklyn Rail.