What’s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson defies classification. She is the author of nine books, spanning poetry, autobiography, art criticism, and theory. This week, Soft Skull Press has reissued her book of poetry, Something Bright, Then Holes. First published in 2007, Something Bright was Nelson’s fifth book, and she has not published a new book of poetry since. Nelson’s nexus is fluidity: gender, pleasure, desire, and the body are questioned with equal rigor as modality, criticality, and theory. Those concerns are present in Something Bright. “I don’t have to be ashamed of my desire / Not for sex, not for language,” the narrator tells us in “A Halo Over the Hospital.” But in this collection, Nelson’s heady, narcotic philosophizing is underpinned by a more personal vulnerability. “Live with your puny, vulnerable self / Live with her,” we are told.

While Something Bright, Then Holes charts many landscapes—from the polluted Gowanus Canal, to a friend’s hospital room, to the inner tautologies of “leave-taking”—the collection centers around the issues of love and loss. “What part of this autonomy / am I not supposed to like?” the narrator expounds in “The Mute Story of November.” The self and the other (romantic, or intellectual) are like binary stars. They threaten to destroy or consume one another: “Yesterday we found something very hard / at our core, a fierce acorn. I don’t know /