<b>A harrowing but clear-eyed examination of crime's emotional fallout</b>
- David Nicholls,
Maggie Nelson’s short, singular books feel pretty light in the hand... <b>But in the head and the heart, they seem unfathomably vast, their cleverness and odd beauty lingering on...</b><b>her work is blazingly intimate</b>
- Rachel Cooke, Observer
<b>Powerful and searingly honest</b>
Guardian
<b>Remarkable. I'm still reeling from its exhilarating brilliance</b>
- Claire-Louise Bennett,
<b>A book-long riff on the first-person essay that Joan Didion built... Nelson eschews tidy resolution. She argues that stories are by nature imperfect – and yet she also shows us how they can become totally worthwhile</b>
Time Out
In writing <i>The Red Parts</i>, Nelson has made her own box holding the fragments of many things. <b>It’s not a beautiful object, but a valuable, coolly shimmering one, which captures the raw bewilderment that can affect a family</b> for generations after a violent loss
San Francisco Chronicle
<b>There is something daring in the intimacy of Nelson’s work..</b>. Her books, five works of nonfiction and four books of poetry, are<b> light in your hands but heavy and powerful in all the nonliteral senses</b>
New York Magazine
<b>Nelson balances starkness with sensitivity and salvages beauty from trauma</b>, while also perverting every strong statement – arguing, softly, against absolutes in general and her own convictions in particular…<b>uncertainty and vulnerability are what is so special about Nelson’s writing</b>... The result is a victim impact statement as complex and perplexing as the case itself… By bouncing everything through the prism of her strong relations; by refusing to be intimidated by originality,<b> Nelson is a true original</b>
Irish Times
<b>Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation</b>
- Olivia Laing, Guardian
<b>Nelson is candid, funny and – for many years a poet – has a talent for compression and juxtaposition that makes for an enthralling use of language</b>
- Paul Laity, Guardian
<b>It’s Nelson’s articulation of her many selves</b> – <b>the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which the protagonist goes from darkness to light, and then falls in love with a singular knight – that makes her readers feel hopeful</b>
New Yorker
<b>Nelson’s cathartic narrative encompasses closure of unrelated events in her own life, such as mourning her dead father, dealing with a recent heartache and reconciling with her once-wayward sister. Her narrative is wrenching</b>
Publishers Weekly
<b>There’s no one quite like Maggie Nelson writing right now... We are lucky to have her</b>
Bookriot
<b>A memoir by a very cool writer</b> – Maggie Nelson reminds me a bit of Joan Didion… Grim, but very well told.
- William Leith, Evening Standard
<b>Nelson confronts both her own and society’s disquieting fascination with the murder of pretty white women</b> – as well as memory of her father’s sudden death…and the way such ruptures inspire a craving for story-making, catharsis, justice and reassuringly tidy ethical lines
Times Literary Supplement