'Maggie Nelson interview: 'People write to me to let me know that, in case I missed it, there are only two genders''. 'Now, Where Was I? : On Maggie Nelson’s Bluets'. Writer and critic Hilton Als praises Bluets as a new form of classicism: 'Balancing pathos with philosophy, she created a new kind of classicism, queer in content but elegant, almost cool in shape'. Reception īluets has been referred to as a 'cult favourite'.

The exploration of the color blue is particularly inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Theory of Colours, and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour. The references include Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sei Shōnagon, Catherine Millet, Chögyam Trungpa, Isabelle Eberhardt, John Berger, and Marguerite Duras. However, most of the text is an analysis of her reading, often referring to other writers' reflections on the color blue, art, literature, philosophy, emotion and female desire. The three main topics that Nelson investigates within Bluets are her affinity to the color blue the loss of her lover, whom she calls 'the prince of blue' and her relationship to a close friend rendered quadriplegic after an accident. As one reads, the book, despite its progression, loses its linearity and feels circular, porous, a tad unstable'. The goal (if there is one) is nomadic, a sort of nomadic mosaic. The critic Thomas Larson refers to the structure as a 'nomadic mosaic': 'Its structure is built by pulling away from the core and by keeping attached to the core. Nelson shuffled the propositions around 'countless times' before arriving at their final order. The propositions are arranged neither chronologically nor thematically, but in each one, Nelson produces links between different blues and their associations. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph, none longer than two hundred words the book totals some nineteen thousand words. That contains an arrangement of 240 loosely-linked prose poems which Nelson refers to as 'propositions'.

Bluets book