Something Bright, Then Holes

Maggie Nelson

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786995735
• eBook ISBN: 9781786995759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Maggie Nelson's third collection of poems combines a wanderer's attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight – of feeling lost, then found, then lost again. The book's three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niedecker-esque meditations written at the shore of a polluted urban canal, a harrowing long poem written at a friend's hospital bedside, and a series of unsparing, crystalline lyrics honoring the conjoined forces of love and sorrow. Whatever the style, the poems are linked by Nelson's singular poetic voice, as sly and exacting as it is raw. The collection is a testament to Nelson's steadfast commitment to chart the facts of feeling, whatever they are, and at whatever the cost.

The Canal Diaries

The Canal Sitters

Every evening the canal sitters

make their way down the street, past

the gigantic mustard-colored pipes

that grind up cement, past

the pale blue and pink factories

exhaling through their vents

Past the marble warehouse with its vats of stucco

Past the oil trucks that stain the walls of their stable

Past the yellow diamond that reads DEAD END

then farther down, another: END

It’s why we’ve come here, apparently, and why

we already know we may not stay long

Meanwhile the sitters have lived here forever

Their job is to sit and watch for new life

Sit and see if anything is growing, has grown, will grow

Sit and see what life is left after all human attempts

to strangle it. What could possibly be born.

They sit and watch the cliffs, they sit and watch

the water. They sit and watch the pigeons

wheel above the cement crusher’s

mean lavender dust. You have to watch

very carefully. You have to sit at dusk

with the man who wears all black, with his

white beard, his ropey face. You cannot ask

his name. You have to use

a quiet pen. You have to notice

the white moth on the engorged

gladiola, you have to pay attention

to the wind. You have to go inside

if the wind moves the dust toward you

And it may come flying toward you

Invisible, coarse, and possible

Flying like a knife down the water.

*

Green

Screams from an Italian family up the street

That stupid kid hitting rock after rock with his metal bat.

I’d be a shitty boyfriend, you said, as if

making a promise. I said, It’s not the content

I’m in love with, it’s the form. And that

was tenderness. All last year

I planned to write a book about

the color blue. Now I’m suddenly surrounded

by green, green gagging me

pleasurably, green holding onto my hips

from behind, digging into

the cleft, the cleft

that can be made. You have no idea

what kind of light you’ll let in

when you drop the bowl, no idea

what will make you full

*

One week

One week on the canal, one week

of this new life. Each day brings

astonishing sights; each day

I’m more petrified.

Maybe living with you doesn’t have to be so hard

(not a new thought)

If I could uproot the weed in me

the weed that grows and grows

so rank and garrulous, so greedy

for the sun, its supremacy

In the library I pick up book after book of poet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Something Bright, Then Holes
• The Canal Diaries
• The Hospital for Special Care
• Something Bright, Then Holes
• Acknowledgments
• About Zed