Maggie Nelson
Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelsonâ€™s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Janeâ€™s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson was born a few years after Janeâ€™s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.,Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related "true crime" books, and fragments from Janeâ€™s own diaries written. 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 anotherâ€™s life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Janeâ€™s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can doâ€”what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.
Poetry,Nonfiction,Autobiography,Memoir,Crime,True Crime,Mystery,Crime,Mystery,Biography Memoir,GLBT,Queer,Contemporary,Writing,Essays
Jane: A Murder