4.5/5

I come to this book many years after having read Maggie Nelson’s stunning The Red Parts which follows up on this story as the case is reopened, around when this book was first published in the early aughts. But Jane, no matter the context in which you approach it, still has incredible raw power as Nelson brings to life a person she never knew whose shadow has loomed large over her life and family for decades. Such an excavation of feeling and the family ties that bind could only be done by Nelson, whose poetry and reflections don’t just try to fill in the space Janie left, but honor the full life she lived before it was tragically cut short.

4.5/5

It is not the time to ask why these things happen,
but to have faith, the reverend said,
and four hundred people wept.

Thirty years later the morning is quiet
and faithless. It is time
to ask questions.

In grade school I had a pen knife leftover from some trip to some national park. In high school I had a slow accumulation of blades from a store in the local Japantown, ones I am still coming across in odd corners of my part of the family house. The first time I went to university, I slept with a medieval monstrosity of a short sword beneath my pillow. The second time, the shelf nearest to the handheight of my bed contains a tissue box on the right and a buck knife on the left, the latter broken in such a way that it won't fold up and must lie there in its sheath, gleaming.

Her mother insisted on having an open casket,
to show everyone Jane was still whole.

If I fought back, would they call the display of his body's aftermath "reverential"? If I fought back, would they say the pearl luminescence apparent on his half-erect cock drove me past the point of simple sexual violation and into the territory of ultimate annihilation? How much of a cult following would I have. How ashamed of the man's end would his family be. The stigma the glory the enjoyment the encouragement the normalization of men's hatred of women, when the parents are expected to take resonsiblity for what was obviously the slipshod raising of a precious daughter, for the Madonna and the whore is a fall from glass encasement to free for all trash, and it's not the man's fault she threw away what womanhood the world respects and invited in such hubris, such a repercussion of fate.

So they guessed she wasn't raped
(but maybe killed)
because she had her period;

the newspapers reported that
her "sanitary napkin"
was found in place.

So what blood
is blood—
head-blood, cunt-blood

Black clots,
red streams
How we've fooled ourselves,

we who've spilled blood
into that which pollutes,
and that which redeems.

It's an old, old, old subject from an old, old, old time, and now, now, now, now, I still fantasize about what I will do when a body hurls itself in a haze of idea that they are predator and I am prey. Self-defense's exceedingly difficult to prove in the legal system of the United States, y'know. His screams will have to suffice.

Shhh don't say anything, just linger in this.

I didn't find myself particularly attached to Jane, and maybe that's the point. There's so much yet so little to go on. The last page was one of the best last pages I've read.