Bluets

It's been said that a great writer can turn any subject into an engaging book, but most authors still choose inherently dramatic themes, and few approach the static or plotless. But this is precisely what Bluets, Maggie Nelson's arty, smart and gorgeous meditation on the color blue, sets out to do, and it is alarming how much drama she creates from a subject so apparently simple... Wittgenstein, Goethe, Gertrude Stein and Yves Klein are just a few of the writers and artists whose work Nelson uses to uncover the potency of the colour. But their true function in the book is to establish a stage on which the author can dance. -- Catherine Lacey 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... Nelson is interested in looking and what it means to see the world and how that is or isn't different from what it means to write about it...Perhaps another way of thinking about Bluets is as an instrument: a looking machine whose sensitivity includes the telescopic, the microscopic, and the flash of heat we feel just before we start to cry... Rather than attach herself to an aesthetic of ugliness in an effort to refuse the confines of ... the patriarchal literary establishment, Nelson transcends them: each proposition is breathtaking. -- Jocelyn Parr 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. -- Dan Richards Big Issue