Jane: A Murder

I had to read this book for my creative writing class and I really liked it. It's a book of poetry a woman wrote about her aunt who was murdered before before she was was born. It's a very deep portrait, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Jane's diaries are extraordinary; oh, maybe they're not but Maggie Nelson frames them in an extraordinarily telling manner, abstracting their most beautiful or witty parts so that often she comes across as a teenage Marquise du Deffand. Considering that Nelson had only two journals to work with, written many years apart, she mines them wonderfully, and part of the heartbreak is realizing how much Jane has grown in the gap of missing years between 1960 and 1966. Sometimes the older Jane strikes a note of spiritual exhaustion, like Francoise Sagan last year at Marienbad: "Cigarettes--one after the other; why?" And the 1966 Jane sometimes seems a little bit like the questioning heroine of the "Go Ask Alice" diaries, a far cry from her innocent days of youth, in which it was bliss to be alive. And yet what Nelson does with this material is in the end a fit memorial for a woman we feel we might almost know, except an evil spirit came down on Michigan and began stamping out its most beautiful citizens. Nelson has attained a niche in both true crime and poetry; has any other writer really been in this crazy space before? The life that she had, born in the wake of this terrible murder, has been a haunted one; for better or for worse poetry got a hold of her. JANE A MURDER is nearly a novel, for it has a strong subplot that culminates in the early death, revealed in "The Burn," of her father, described almost as an apple, strawberry, or rose. "I remember thinking he looked really, really red," a classmate tells Maggie. "Like he was about to burst." The trope of bursting is everywhere in these plain and wonderfully turned poems. Ripeness is all, a surreal ripeness like the bright beating bead at the end of the thermometer. A friend recommended this book for its therapeutic value, as though Nelson had healed herself, or her family, through writing it all out, but I don't think that it's about rescue per se, it's more about noticing how vivid it all is, life, death, going away, coming back, the pulsating world.

Maggie Nelson is an extraordinary writer. She is able to convey complexity in the sparces of prose/poetry. Her book is griping. You cannot stop reading even as you are horrified and pained by what she has to tell you. And what she has to tell is very much about how loss, painful loss crosses generations. This is a book very much about grief across generations in a single American family. Maggie does not prettify the range of emotions that come with tragic loss. She is not afraid to show the rage as well as the sorrow and how these emotions are mixed and intermingled.