In 2009, poet, critic, and essayist Maggie Nelson published Bluets. Comprised of 240 loosely linked propositions modeled after Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, the text's numbered fragments offer a meditation on blue, loneliness, sex, pain, death, and—notably—divinity. Indeed, in its opening pages, Nelson's Bluets reads:
That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this. (Nelson 2009, 2)
Nelson has been classified as a practitioner of queer theory, autotheory, the lyric essay—her work is heralded for its formal and generic innovation—but...
