Dildos and a Beckett Novel - Daily Beast
Maggie Nelson is one of our greatest poets and essayists. Among her nine books, her lyric essay Bluets is a cult classic among MFA students , her essay collection The Art of Cruelty looks at the darkest and most disturbing images of art and does not flinch, and her book The Red Parts is a disturbing cold... Now, in The Argonauts , she has written a family memoir, but this poet of sublime intensity and violence has not gone suburban on us. In the first paragraph, it’s clear that this may be about a family, but it is not family viewing: “…the words I... She falls in love with an artist and doesn’t know what pronoun to use. The artist Harry Dodge was born Harriet Dodge and was still in the midst of making the surgical transition to the male pronoun. In the midst of the indeterminacy, we experience the life of the mind, the body, the artist, the poet, and finally, a baby boy, who emerges in a graphic and wrenching birth, one that stretches the body and the heart. She spoke to us in Los Angeles, where she is a professor in the School of Critical Studies at Cal Arts. What is the central conflict of this book. Well, the book begins with a debate my partner Harry [Dodge] and I had about language, about what can be understood and expressed. Source: www.thedailybeast.com
