I wondered if you could talk about the experience of having a book reissued ten years later.

I don’t know / if we were born with it, or if its mass simply accrued / in the darkness.” They threaten to destroy or consume one another: “Yesterday we found something very hard / at our core, a fierce acorn. “What part of this autonomy / am I not supposed to like?” the narrator expounds in “The Mute Story of November.” The self and the other (romantic, or intellectual) are like binary stars. While Something Bright, Then Holes charts many landscapes-from the polluted Gowanus Canal, to a friend’s hospital room, to the inner tautologies of “leave-taking”-the collection centers around the issues of love and loss.

“Live with your puny, vulnerable self / Live with her,” we are told. “I don’t have to be ashamed of my desire / Not for sex, not for language,” the narrator tells us in “A Halo Over the Hospital.” But in this collection, Nelson’s heady, narcotic philosophizing is underpinned by a more personal vulnerability. Those concerns are present in Something Bright. Nelson’s nexus is fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory. First published in 2007, Something Bright was Nelson’s fifth book, and she has not published a new book of poetry since. This week, Soft Skull Press has reissued her book of poetry, Something Bright, Then Holes.

She is the author of nine books, spanning poetry, autobiography, art criticism, and theory.

Bluets maggie nelson review