Something Bright, Then Holes is the fourth collection of poems by Maggie Nelson, one of the country�s most restless, daring, and prolific younger writers. In this book Nelson combines a wanderer�s attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. The title refers to a once-blind girl�s description of a hand upon gaining vision, and Something Bright, Then Holes circles relentlessly around the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight�of feeling lost, then found, then lost again, or both at the same time. The book�s three sections range widely, and include a long sequence of Niedecker-esque meditations written at the shore of a notoriously polluted urban canal, a harrowing long poem of witness written at a friend�s hospital bedside, and a series of unsparing, crystalline lyrics which honor the conjoined forces of eros and sorrow. Whatever their experiment, the poems remain linked by Nelson�s singular poetic voice, which is as sly and exacting as it is raw and cracked open. This new collection is further testament to Nelson�s ongoing investment in the powers of honest, lucid, and urgent forms of address, and to her development of an expansive, risk-taking poetry, inexorably driven by �the hype of clarity,� and steadfastly committed to charting the facts of feeling, whatever they may be, and at whatever the cost.

Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of The Red Parts (Free Press, March 2007), a nonfiction book about her family and criminal justice, and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions(Univ of Iowa press, Oct 2007), a critical study about poetry and painting. She is also the author of three previous collections of poetry, including Jane: A Murder (2005), which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, The Latest Winter (2003), and Shiner (2001), which was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America�s Norma Farber First Book Award. She has taught literature and writing at Wesleyan University, the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, and Pratt Institute of Art. In 2005 she joined the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Valencia, California. She lives in Los Angeles.