Bluets

Arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue.

Time Out

What could be more invented than a life story that reads like a novel? Bluets doesn’t invent that way: its inventions are wilder, wiser (and more true) than that… each proposition is breathtaking.

Brick

A real short-sharp punch in the heart. Truly sad and beautiful, it’s a raw meditation on falling passionately in love with a colour.

Big Issue

I remember where I was when I read each of Maggie Nelson's books in the same way I remember a place where I heard important news. Her words come, as though from a great distance, and strike incredibly close. I did not actually read Bluets, I think - I just let it hit me.

Anne Enright

Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation.

Olivia Laing

Maggie Nelson... She's so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

A gorgeous, eddying read.

Claire-Louise Bennett

A luminous meditation on the author’s love for a single colour that displaces itself onto the grief prompted by the end of a relationship and the serious injury of a friend.

Jenny Hendrix, Times Literary Supplement

[Nelson's] candour, also evident in The Argonauts, gives Bluets a turbo-charged vitality, precision and authenticity that frees her to reflect on the way female desire is too often sidelined or ignored.... In her dark excavation of grief, she has collected messages of great wisdom and powerful beauty.

Gavin Francis, Guardian

Nelson… looks sideways at her heartbreak, allowing for moments of piercing clarity as feelings come into focus. There is wisdom and beauty in this short work.

Fiona Wilson, The Times

Bluets is a slim but intense volume dedicated to the colour blue, and to feeling blue. Nelson takes a Wittgensteinian form and fills it with feeling. In 240 loosely linked fragments she moves between memoir and analysis, from spiritual inquiry to erotic obsession… Beautiful.

Tom Graham, Financial Times

Transcendent.... very inspiring. She’s an amazing writer.

Lorde, Irish Times

A syncopated arrangement of 240 prose poems collected across three years of slowly dwindling grief and heartbreak, it centres around the colour blue and how it helped to heal Nelson’s pain.

Isobel Thompson, A-List

This discussion of the colour blue is a gorgeous read, almost religious in the way it defaults to the beautiful and the sublime.

Anne Enright, Guardian

When I want a sprawling, consuming book about love and loss, I turn to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The compact hybrid book of literature, memoir, and poetry at only 99 pages in length lingers long after the cover is turned over.

Sarah MacDonald, Vice

I can’t stop thinking about [Bluets].

Darci Phenix

Always beguiling, her writing is powerful, incisive and so singular that it defies categorization … raw, honest and urgent… [Nelson] always prompt me to see some aspect of life very differently.

Alice Rawsthorn, Observer

The book that changed my life... it's just brilliant.

Sophie Mackintosh, Guardian

Last year, while recovering from a break up with a long-term partner, I carried the book with me everywhere... The way that she renders her experiences and thoughts in such vivid, aching and raw detail served as a shelter for me, and a way to articulate feelings I didn't yet have the distance or strength to put words to.

Zaina Arafat, Good Housekeeping

Bluets is an expansive, intensely poetic text about Nelson's life-long infatuation with the colour blue... in Nelson's most visceral moments of divulgence, we see a testament to love in all its inexpressibility.

Martha French, Varsity