Something Bright, Then Holes: Poems

These days / the world seems to split up / into those who need to dredge / and those who shrug their shoulders / and say, It’s just something / that happened. While Maggie Nelson refers here to a polluted urban waterway, the Gowanus Canal, these words could just as easily describe Nelson’s incisive approach to desire, heartbreak, and emotional excavation in Something Bright, Then Holes . Whether writing from the debris-strewn shores of a contaminated canal or from the hospital…