The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

And now we may add to the mix Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder, which I picked up at the office of the magazine where I hang my occasional hat. This is an interesting book for me to pick up right now because it matches what I'm interested in at the moment: direct language, direct ways of saying things. Directness has for too long been the province of less imaginative poets. There's something haunting, and truly sad, and truly upsetting about the book, but one sense that Nelson must have taken great pleasure in writing the book. And by pleasure, of course, I don't mean happiness, I suppose I mean gratification. You get the sense of real progress as the book moves along, of mental evolution, of the intellectual penetration of genealogy, of going beyond naive wonderings about ancestry to something more inclusive, or at least more permeable.