Maggie Nelson is an American poet-critic-theorist who has lived and worked on both coasts. Her work is fascinating in it’s shimmering specificities, the way she continually reaches through actual occurrence to brush the essence with her fingertips. But it’s not just incidents that happened to her, it’s information she has sought out and resonated with - going from a specific account of her own failed relationship to the optical experimentation of Newton in less than a page. Her work is ambitious but never clumsy, challenging but never difficult, emotional but not quite sappy...