Bluets is like no other book I’ve read—it’s comprised of a number of extremely short essays, some so short they may actually qualify as poems instead. The book purports to be a meditation on the color blue, but after reading for a while you understand what it’s really about—or perhaps what it’s also about, besides the blue. Bluets is brief enough that multiple readings are feasible, and lovely enough that they’re also desirable.

I’ve been meaning to read Maggie Nelson for a while now, and thanks to this gift from a dear friend I finally did. Nelson’s writings, by reputation, defy categorization: that’s certainly true here, the easiest label to give it being “creative nonfiction." Her numbered ‘entries’ are not poems and don’t add up to equal a story, though there are stories within. Her musings and meditations become mini-essays. Taken altogether, it is controlled, precise writing.Her inspirations are not only her obses...

Beautiful prose, beautiful insights that I highlighted to put into my commonplace book, but a majority of the collection I wasn’t completely invested in.

”If a colour could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair?” Blue, blå, blauw, bleu, blau, κυανό, azzurro, azul, sinij, modra, blár….. a colour that carries powerful imagery, thoughts and memories…Maggie Nelson is a writer I’ve always wanted to know more about and a beautiful review by my good friend Hannah convinced me that the time had finally come. It was a deeply poignant, haunting, almost transcendental reading experience.In this book, we have the writer’s musings o

If we could marry books, I'd already be known as Mrs. Bluets.

this morning i saw a beautiful sunrise like lava bursting through rock and my friend sent me a picture of some blood at a crime scene on a london pavement she nearly stepped in and i read 'bluets'. none of these are connected but of course they're all related, much like the propositions in the book. one on its own is a tree, a star, but together they all make up a vast landscape that encompasses every possible facet of the human experience. reading 'bluets' was like breaking into a swimming pool...

This is the third book by Maggie Nelson I have read and my favourite so far. I admire her craft very much and thought this book near perfect. It is a collection of short thoughts, brief paragraphs that pack a punch, all losely structured around the colour blue.Maggie Nelson, as always, unapologetically places herself in the center of her art; I adore that. This is an introspective book centered around the loss of a partner and grief and depression and the injury of a close friend and, yes, the c...

It’s kind of cliche to say that you don’t choose the people you love. But I’ve been thinking about this recently, maybe because Maggie Nelson starts off the book with this point, that she didn’t choose to fall in love with blue (yes the color). The book continually repeats cliches like this without shame, but then takes it in a slightly odd direction (like being in love with a color) that ends up (because of its strangeness and forthrightness) being oddly effective in terms of getting us to reev...

I'm very moved by this book and shall reread it from time to time.

I've noticed in reviews of this personal essay that opinions are at least partially influenced by whether or not the reviewer had already read THE ARGONAUTS. The strengths of BLUETS - the mingling of private sexual detail with academic research; Nelson's keen eye and unique rendering of anxiety - are shared with ARGONAUTS, but this lacks the encompassing mingling of art and life that made that later book so special. I imagine BLUETS would have felt less primordial if it was my introduction to Ne...

Beautiful and lyrical celebration of the color blue. Related also to, well, feeling blue, out of loss.Liked it even better the second time around. She revolves around the color blue, to talk of sadness, of losing love, she goes through many referencies, from Wittgenstein, to Leonard Cohen, Van Gogh, Warhol, CeZanne, Mallarme, different films, friends, etc. There is something about the way it is structured which I particularly liked, and that´s the fact that the paragraphs are numbered, as if tha...

i really do not know how to rate this. i was pretty uninterested for most of it and felt like the writing was trying too hard, but the. there are a few lines that really spoke to me. i enjoyed that she used so many quotes from others but i felt they over shadowed her own writing as they tended to be the best lines. there were many of her own sentences/ paragraphs that just seemed so random and disrupted the flow . i think i also just would not like her as a person and that was distracting me lol...

A numbered meditation on longing, love, obsession, connection at once spiritual, associative, interpersonal, and physical. Superficially about a color. Wondered what she would've written about "Blue Is the Warmest Color," but then again she's given up on the cinema. The sort of sensibility that prefers "cinema" to film or movie or, certainly, flick. Sexually explicit at regular intervals to keep you on your toes among the obligatory Goethe and Wittgenstein quotation. Acknowledges and dismisses G...

This book terrifies me, because it's so nicely written and interestingly formed and also so completely vapid. My fear comes from my absolute certainty that over the next 20 years I'm going to have to put up with dozens of books just like this, insofar as they'll be all 'experimental' (i.e., about fucking) and 'experimental' (i.e., self-obsessed), and 'experimental' (i.e., full of literary existentialism), and 'experimental' (i.e., quasi-educated), but not at all 'experimental' (i.e., interesting...

It is not often that I come across a book I absolutely loathe - a book that makes me shake with impotent rage at its complete intellectual and aesthetic uselessness. Well, this is one of them - a book that glorifies depression and lack of social adaptability, a book whose author is apparently so in love with herself that she considers any and every piece of delirious bogus her mind produces worth publishing. Here's a quote: "I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all word...

I think it's safe to say the most famous study of color-as-reflection-of-individual-as-reflection-of-society-as-reflection-of-color study was Gass' On Being Blue, which Nelson cites here and seems to have a mixed-to-negative relationship with. For me, On Being Blue is a beautiful little book. Gass' eloquence can't be denied, nor can his intelligence and personable voice that doesn't always come through in his fiction. But it's no Bluets. This is everything good about the Gass study plus more; he...

Expectation equals disappointment. I know, I know. I should not have had expectations. What work would not break under such weight? Aside from anything written by Karl Ove Mouthguard? I was excited by the cover, whose cosmic blue seemed lifted from my sparkly blue bedroom walls. I was excited by the form, which upon scanning in the basement of the bookstore in Princeton, NJ reminded me of The Gay Science. I was excited!I console myself with the fact that Maggie Nelson, PhD, was thirty when she s...

A lyrical essay made up of loosely connected prose-poems, Bluets examines love and loss through the lens of the color blue. For much of the book, Nelson reminisces about her relationship with a former partner, as she cares for a friend recently rendered quadriplegic. All the while, she considers what a wide range of cultural icons have had to say about melancholy, grief, and, of course, the titular color. Goethe, Stein, Emerson, Leonard Cohen, and Lucinda Williams are but a few of the many refer...

a lot of elegant writing on a sentence level, a lot of interesting observations, a lot of great quotes from famous writers and philosophers, and some neat facts about the color blue... but man, just so unrelentingly sad, maddeningly reticent (for a memoir), and HUMORLESS... like being trapped in a sad box for 90 pages... just you and the color blue and the word "fucking"...

I like Bluets a lot. The book is a collection of lyrical essays that I think could also be called prose poems, but they are a range of things: inquiry into other color works, mundane observations, about blue things, peppered with sex memories. Blue is about blue, the color, and the various emotional states we associate it with, but it is also about grief, the loss of a relationship, an analogical way of expressing that obsession and that amputated passion. As a meditation about blue, she also so...