It is blue.'For to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.'Black and blue. Only, they all end up on the person you have lost now unreachable, invisible.

They come and go like a thousand thoughts, your mind's a miles away, you're sitting in a bus, the bus continues to take you faraway from somewhere. A raw and moving prose-poetry - at times disjointed, other times painfully fitting - which reads like a set of persistent memories. Its jack-of-all-trades personification and flexible contradictions are proofs of how it kindles and washes away a spectrum of emotions. Quite a metaphor for love and loss, loneliness and lust at a palpable distance and such is Maggie Nelson's eulogy for its kept fragments.'How often I've imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face.'In Bluets, the enduring reputation of the colour blue appears in a number of references and parallels: films (Derek Jarman's poignant Blue, a little surprising she did not mention Kieślowski's Blue), music (Joni Mitchell's unforgettable Blue), and literature (Gass' On Being Blue). I am still looking for the beauty in that.'It feels like a beloved antique glass that slips from your hand accidentally, however gently, then you stare at its shards partly trying to let it all sink in, partly hoping it will glue itself back together and become whole again. 'Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness.

Maggie nelson's bluets