Pathemata
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  • Published: 20 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781911717454
  • Imprint: Fern Press
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99

Pathemata

Or, The Story of My Mouth

Formats & editions
Hardback
20 May 2025
EBook
15 May 2025
Audiobook
15 May 2025
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A major and profound, new original work by the author of The Argonauts and Bluets

It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream – the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind

This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.

Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss – the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.
  • Published: 20 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781911717454
  • Imprint: Fern Press
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic and the author of five books of non-fiction. Her books include The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (a New York Times Editor’s Choice) and The Argonauts (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as four collections of poetry. In 2016 she was awarded the MacArthur Genius fellowship. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

portrait photo of Maggie Nelson

Also by Maggie Nelson

Bluets
Like Love
On Freedom
The Red Parts
See all

Praise for Pathemata

'Among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation'

Olivia Laing

‘One of the most unique voices in non-fiction: enquiring, political, lyrically dazzling, empathetic’

Sinéad Gleeson

‘Always brilliant’

Geoff Dyer

‘Her words come as though from a great distance and strike incredibly close’

Anne Enright

‘Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating’

Eula Biss

‘Maggie Nelson who writes with such passion, clarity, explicitness, fluidity, playfulness and generosity that she redefines what thinking can do today’

Wayne Koestenbaum

In Pathemata, Nelson somehow manages to write with perfect emotional pitch: its melancholia balanced with humour, its moments of grief and pain tempered by joy. Full of warmth, wisdom and weirdness, it is bound to become a classic. I adored it

Jenny Mustard
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