Synopses & Reviews
A new entry in Soft Skull's ShortLit series,
Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane. Though officially unsolved, Jane's murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders near the University of Michigan in the late 1960s. Nelson was born a few years after Jane's death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her aunt's murder cast over both the family and her psyche. Through a collage of poetry, prose, dream accounts, and documentary sources including fragments from Jane's own diaries the book explores the nature of this haunting incident and raises deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another's life and death.
Part elegy, part memoir, part detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane's powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do, what kinds of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.
Review
"A deep, dark, female masterpiece." Eileen Myles
Review
"This true story of murder and childhood beats down the last sparks in the cremains of genre with grace and appetite. Poets who want to write fiction and fiction writers who are sick of their limits, take a good look at this book that is speedy and readable in all the right ways. It is a model for change." Fanny Howe
Review
"In this blurred genre memoir, Maggie Nelson attempts through poems, reflections, diary excerpts, dreams, scraps of newspaper accounts, and excerpts from police records to resuscitate a sense of her murdered aunt. Haunting this book are Jane's unaccounted for last hours, 'a gap so black/it could eat/an entire sun/without leaving/a trace.' But Jane is less about filling that gap than about illuminating the life that existed before, and the lives that struggled on after, her death. An empathetic and beautifully controlled approach to a profoundly difficult event." Brian Evenson
Review
"Like all naturals, Nelson is driven by an ambition somewhere between mission and compulsion. Lucky for us." Jordan Davis, constantcritic.com
Synopsis
Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane's murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson was born a few years after Jane's death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.
Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related -true crime- books, and fragments from Jane's own diaries written. Each piece in Jane has its own form that serves as an important fissure, disrupting the tabloid, -page-turner- quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another's life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane's powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do--what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.
Synopsis
Part elegy, part true crime story, this memoir-in-verse from the author of the award-winning The Argonauts expands the notion of how we tell stories and what form those stories take through the story of a murdered woman and the mystery surrounding her last hours.
Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane's murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Jane's death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.
Exploring the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related "true crime" books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, and fragments from Jane's own diaries written when she was 13 and 21, its eight sections cover Jane's childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson's girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane's sister) to retrace the path of Jane's final hours.
Each piece in Jane has its own form, and the movement from each piece to the next--along with the white space that surrounds each fragment--serve as important fissures, disrupting the tabloid, "page-turner" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another's life and death. Equal parts a elegy, memoir, detective story, meditation on violence (and serial, sexual violence in particular), and conversation between the living and the dead, Jane's powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, shows its readers what poetry is capable of--what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.
About the Author
Maggie Nelson has published two collections of poetry, Shiner (2001) and The Latest Winter (2003), both from Hanging Loose Press. She has also taught literature and writing at Wesleyan, the Graduate Writing Program of New School University, and Pratt Institute.