“My relatives all say
Jane wanted to change the world

Then they add
None of us can”

God, the scars the families of victims carry.

Very personal & very sad

an absolutely riveting masterpiece

(but then again, so is everything maggie nelson writes)

(but then again, this one feels special to me)

Jane: A Murder is a sharp subversion and critique of the murder mystery/true crime genre. Although ostensibly centered around Maggie Nelson's aunt Jane's 1969 murder, this book was not written to examine the gruesome details of the act, nor speculate about who the killer is or what their motives may have been. Instead, Maggie Nelson is more interested in portraying all the personality and potential that Jane held as a young woman, and through this, revisiting aspects of Nelson's own life, womanhood, and family. Piecing together verse, prose poems, news accounts, and segments from Jane's old diary, Maggie Nelson interrogates the gendered violence of our culture (am I part of this world / or not quite), our cultural fascination with making entertainment of serial murder, and the after-effects of a family choice to hide and move past their grief (They know how to mourn / with dignity, / my mother says. / It's the Calvinist way. / As if keening on your knees / were somehow obscene / As if there were a control / so marvelous / you could teach it / to eat pain.). The result is a heartbreaking, honest, personal account of the ever-rippling pain that comes from losing a young family member, and all she stands for, to unexplained violence.

A book about the murder of the author’s aunt becomes this amazing piece of work that makes one consider how much we can know of a person’s life and death while meditating on the grief that permeates all these years later. I loved it.

Nelson creates an intricate textual exploration into the fragmentary process of dealing with grief, loss, unsolved crime and violence, and the kind of shadow a family member can cast over an entirely family when they die young and unnaturally. Weaving her aunt's journal entries, her own poetry, news reports, and more, the book serves as both an inquiry into Jane's death and a tribute to her life. Although, mostly presented in verse form in terms of line breaks and spacing, it reads with the kind of momentum a prose drama might as it pulls you ever deeper into the pain, confusion, and loss the Mixer family experienced. Nelson is one of only a few writers who seem to create and leverage such an exquisite tension between the analytical and the emotional in their writing.
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an excerpt:

DIGNITY

They knew how to mourn
with dignity

my mother says.
It's the Calvinist way.

As if keening on your knees
were somehow obscene

As if there were a control
so marvelous

you could teach it
to eat pain.

the most structurally unique book I think I’ve read