Something bright, then holes

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.