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Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related "true crime" books such as The Michigan Murders and Killers Among Us, and fragments from Jane’s own diaries written when she was 13 and 21. Its eight sections cover Jane's childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson's girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane's sister) to retrace the path of Jane's final hours.

Each piece in Jane has its own form that serves as an important fissure, disrupting the tabloid, "page-turner" quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another’s life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, part detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane’s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do—what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.

Maggie Nelson has published two collections of poetry, Shiner (2001) and The Latest Winter (2003), both from Hanging Loose Press. She has also taught literature and writing at Wesleyan, the Graduate Writing Program of New School University, and Pratt Institute.

From The Light of the Mind
(Four Dreams)

She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She was wandering, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying. The holes in her head were perfectly round and bloodless, with burnt-flared edges, two eclipses. The passage of air through the holes felt peculiar, just dimly painful, like chewing hot or cold food on a cavity, the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full.
Sunlight shot around the circumference of each black rind, so that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.
Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?
So I was a genius after all! The thought made her smile, but then she wondered, Why had the light always been invisible? I must have been squandering it, I must have felt only its vaguest rotations. Now what can I do with it? If I could find a lampshade, someone could read by it. I might illuminate entire rooms, entire dungeons, I shine so bright.
But in fact she was losing the light; it leaked everywhere, unstoppable.
*
She wakes up. Opens her eyes and sees peonies standing absolutely still. The window frames a solid blue mist; it is 5:30 a.m.
She sleeps next to a mirror, sits up and looks into it.
There is one slightly enlarged freckle which she cannot remember having seen before, smack in the middle of her forehead. She watches it, puts a finger to it.
Pale white skin covered with freckles, what’s one more? But the dream! What’s one more.
The air is unbearably wet with mist, and suddenly she thinks she can see the freckle growing—just as the flowers are surely growing; but slowly, slowly.
The freckle is turning purple, a miniature contusion. Then darker purple still, as the flowers begin to grow heavy with the weight of their petals. The leaves flop over the edge and begin to dangle to the floor as the spot begins to blacken.
Ever so slowly, the spot becomes a hole.


“How did you come to write this book?”

The book began quite literally with a series of recurring dreams I had when I was 23 (Jane's age at the time of her death). These dreams now form the opening section, “The Light of the Mind.” In the dreams, I had been shot in the head, and was wandering around, trying not to die, trying to find someone who might be able to save me, or at least make use of my death in some way. I didn't recognize right away that I was dreaming about Jane; when I realized it later, I understood how profoundly her death haunted me. I realized how, up until that point, part of me had seriously doubted that I would outlive her. More sinister still, I saw that for years I had unconsciously suspected a similar fate might await me.

Although I had clearly internalized Jane's story, I was forced to admit that I knew next to nothing about the exact circumstances of her death. Suddenly it felt very urgent to know. Not feeling as though I could ask anyone in my family, my private research began. Also, I had been reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and I became very taken with the idea that no one had talked Jane through her walk to the other side-hence her wandering, like a hungry ghost, in my dreams, in my mother's dreams. So in a sense the book began in the hope of doing her ghost this service.

After I accidentally happened upon some of Jane's journals back at home in CA, I became possessed with the desire to bring her voice back to life. Then after reading through the wretchedly sensationalist, often misogynistic journalism that surrounded the “co-ed killings”—exemplified most blatantly by The Michigan Murders (of which there is also a movie, but I haven't seen it)—I felt the need to revisit the brutal details of her murder in print, but in a radically distinct way. I became angry at the explicit or tacit linkage of her rebellious and outspoken spirit with the cruel circumstance of her death—a linkage made by the press and the community—and I hoped the knot might unravel through writing.