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Shiner
Poetry. "Maggie Nelson has such drive in her language. Things do not dangle off this drive, but rather get resolutely pushed aside by her poem's forward motion. Also, she exercises the infinitesimal pause that is great poetry. Her SHINER is totally cool. She delivers the goods with fiendish delight"--Eileen Myles.
Hardcover
First published March 1, 2001
14 people are currently reading
944 people want to read
About the author
Maggie Nelson
40 books4,624 followersMaggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
December 18, 2020
at first i was like “these poems are ok” and then one day i got home from work and had the apartment to myself and read the poems out loud and then i realized that they were perfect.
August 31, 2016
I imagine there’s a certain mindset you have to get into to review a book like Shiner, a debut from a monumentally talented author that certainly shows their talent but doesn’t quite reveal how spectacular they are and gives no indication of the myriad ways they would develop. In the case of Maggie Nelson, I’d have to zap myself back to 2001, when she was still rising up through the poetry journals and not attempting her terrific lyric essay-poetry fusion project that she started on with Jane: A Murder and perfected with curve-wreckers Bluets and The Argonauts, but a fine conventional lyric poet just the same. Granted, she’d get better even at the conventional stuff (check out Something Bright, Then Holes, and I’m sure The Latest Winter is a step up, too) – she’s sometimes a little scattershot here, and her images don’t always connect; the poem "At Carnegie Hall" doesn't really come together for me. Yet even the apprentice Nelson reveals plenty of talent, and even the apprentice Nelson has the ability to take a wrecking ball to your emotions with a well-timed turn of phrase. Take this bit from "Second Avenue, Winter" - "We may be waiting for/a signal sent one hundred years ago, and/it'll take one hundred more to get one back," or how on "Sunday Night" she compares the moon to "a crooked/smile of luminous jest," which is also a brilliant bit of enjambment. All this makes Shiner worth the effort it’ll take to track down, but don’t make it your first Maggie Nelson book. Do, however, take a moment to swim in this line from "The Deep Blue Sea" -
"When I read your poems/I drank the rain."
"When I read your poems/I drank the rain."
April 9, 2020
Everything is
muted and blue
the tip-tap of
creation seems
cloudy, not crisp
and words know
nothing more
than I do, or
they’re not
telling.
Read this in one sitting and I’m sure I’ll revisit. 💙
muted and blue
the tip-tap of
creation seems
cloudy, not crisp
and words know
nothing more
than I do, or
they’re not
telling.
Read this in one sitting and I’m sure I’ll revisit. 💙
July 18, 2023
Cannot decide on Maggie Nelson!!! I liked it more and more as it went on. Will be rereading Bluets just to see how it makes me feel. Some lines I thought hmm no not really and some I underlined because I really liked. Will be thinking about this one for a while. She is really interesting.
June 17, 2019
Many of the poems in this collection slipped by without sinking in because they felt deeply personal and specific. The ones that didn't, those that were a bit more accessible and translatable, were incredible though.
January 13, 2021
this was more of a 4 star read if we are being, like, Objective, but I am sad and I recently reread Maggie Nelson’s ‘Something Bright, Then Holes’ (read it for the first time like 2 yrs ago) which was a really impactful read for me and is still one of my fave poetry collections evr, so even tho her debut collection was lacking a lot of the gut punches that SBTH has and she uses way too many exclamation points in the beginning poems, maybe like 60% of the poems were 5 star poems and made my heart do Things and that’s good enough for me to give it 5 stars on Goodreads
December 28, 2023
maggie nelson is utterly excellent, as always. you can def tell that this is a debut, not the work of an established author, as there's growing left to do, but on the whole it is beautiful and excellent and i loved.
Light another, / another crinkling thing / doomed to burn up, then / be pondered. No. / I want to love you nobly, / then be forgotten. (page 65)
Light another, / another crinkling thing / doomed to burn up, then / be pondered. No. / I want to love you nobly, / then be forgotten. (page 65)
February 3, 2025
Forgot I don’t really like poetry
November 13, 2025
so it turns out that Maggie Nelson has always been extraordinary
September 3, 2021
I just don’t understand poetry
December 13, 2020
Such a delight. To read and revisit time and time again.
May 28, 2019
I know I'm not supposed to be charmed by lines like "Now I'm going to buy // as much beer as five dollars // can buy and drink it // right here on the sofa" and "your swollen sinus headache prohibits sex // and that's too bad as I have a fever" in these dark days of instagram poets but I chuckled at them, so there.
May 11, 2022
With a tone reminiscent of a watered down Sylvia Plath, this debut collection did have some moments. For future reference my favourite poems upon my first reading were: Today's Snow, Eighteen Days Until Christmas, The Deep Blue Sea, The Ovals and Apology. Not my favourite collection however it has merit, albeit sparse :))
May 28, 2019
I love Maggie Nelson’s work and read her books from most recent to oldest. This book demonstrates all the potential she shows much later on in her life, but it doesn’t quite have the brilliance of Bluets. Still, there are a few shining poems in this collection.
July 16, 2019
The house is over. That is,
what you never went back for
has been loaded into a dumpster...
This is memory
weather, and I remember
the roof in summer. How it stood.
How we stood upon it.
what you never went back for
has been loaded into a dumpster...
This is memory
weather, and I remember
the roof in summer. How it stood.
How we stood upon it.
December 10, 2025
Poems Maggie wrote in her 20s? Yes please. I love the electricity of reading the early work of a writer I adore. You can feel the hunger right under the surface, the way every line is reaching, testing, wanting. It reminds me that desire itself is holy (read: tender & brutal) (read: ‘It's everything! I'm everything!’ as Doechii in BOOM BAP), and that devotion can be a channel for all our restless wanting.
Maggie, what potent seeds you planted.
What quiet ka-booms.
———
the earth is
molten and
made of
moods so
go ahead
blow it up
blow it up
your mouth
full of love
and anger
and white-
gold milk
a crack of
infinity will
pulse on in
Joy got lost, so lost
she couldn't find the sky.
If she doesn't live here,
who are all the lights for?
Who is doing the living?
Now that there's no more wine, it's time for bed
What a comfort, to be less than a breath.
You have this many lines
to get it done—what?—
Delineate the undelineatable
Make it new, everyone kept saying
so I gave up, and made it mine
What if all the flakes are ghosts each one with a message that floats down and melts unread
That would help to explain our dogged apprehension of tragedy
force it into
the inevitable
blind faith meets
idiot will
If we could sit and say
nothing and both
love its music.
Dusk comes down
like a dumbbell
shadowed with
orange. Don't be
so sensitive, it says,
you and your daddy cap
and untapped ore.
Do you hear the captain
punching tickets? We're leaving
the station. We move in
and around large sounds.
Now, for the chalked-up meeting
of our hearts.
When I read your poems
I drank the rain. I dug
my heels in, let weeping
root me. What wind there was
sped and hiccupped along
until l was dry, hung out on a line.
You threw it out there, only hinted
where to look. I swam. Then up
it bobbed, one heart-
red buoy in the deep blue
sea. But winking at me.
Nothing howls in my skull these days
It's tranquil enough in there
Phosphenes of cornflower, lust
for running water, a throbbing lack
of historical fact. I don't even miss him,
and I see why you don't care. Where
we are when we can't help each other
is here.
Everything conspires to make this journey go fast
the jet stream, the in-flight entertainment, etc.
When really the sky and sea frenching into the sorry sand
is all I want to think about, and the slippery red sun going down
O beauty, what do you do with it
after crying wolf about it for so long?
Let it turn into an overgrown lot
Put a firecracker up its arse
What do you say, Mr. Kind Eyes?
When the gang has you licked,
do not surrender. In your
worst night of dying damsels,
weep, but also befriend a tree.
Do not let them gore you of Zen
in that worst night, gondolier!
Hobble through the grit
thy vest made of spritzer,
hops, and the sun's tears.
There, in the back country of friends.
You say you're hungry for my body but what does that mean
Is it the way I want to be one
of the orange chunky clouds getting
whipped around? The wind whips everything around tonight, it has a will, it is crisp and regal
Only the constellations stay put, flat white pinups, always playing it cool.
I enter the crescendo
of those images, feel
the chariot that has driven
your hands. Light another,
another crinkling thing
doomed to burn up, then
be pondered. No.
I want to love you nobly,
then be forgotten.
This is how it goes, then,
the walk toward
union.
I twinkle
across the
distance, not
really knowing
your point of
view. Are we
the glass
the world pours
into, or is it
our love that
saturates
the world?
Maggie, what potent seeds you planted.
What quiet ka-booms.
———
the earth is
molten and
made of
moods so
go ahead
blow it up
blow it up
your mouth
full of love
and anger
and white-
gold milk
a crack of
infinity will
pulse on in
Joy got lost, so lost
she couldn't find the sky.
If she doesn't live here,
who are all the lights for?
Who is doing the living?
Now that there's no more wine, it's time for bed
What a comfort, to be less than a breath.
You have this many lines
to get it done—what?—
Delineate the undelineatable
Make it new, everyone kept saying
so I gave up, and made it mine
What if all the flakes are ghosts each one with a message that floats down and melts unread
That would help to explain our dogged apprehension of tragedy
force it into
the inevitable
blind faith meets
idiot will
If we could sit and say
nothing and both
love its music.
Dusk comes down
like a dumbbell
shadowed with
orange. Don't be
so sensitive, it says,
you and your daddy cap
and untapped ore.
Do you hear the captain
punching tickets? We're leaving
the station. We move in
and around large sounds.
Now, for the chalked-up meeting
of our hearts.
When I read your poems
I drank the rain. I dug
my heels in, let weeping
root me. What wind there was
sped and hiccupped along
until l was dry, hung out on a line.
You threw it out there, only hinted
where to look. I swam. Then up
it bobbed, one heart-
red buoy in the deep blue
sea. But winking at me.
Nothing howls in my skull these days
It's tranquil enough in there
Phosphenes of cornflower, lust
for running water, a throbbing lack
of historical fact. I don't even miss him,
and I see why you don't care. Where
we are when we can't help each other
is here.
Everything conspires to make this journey go fast
the jet stream, the in-flight entertainment, etc.
When really the sky and sea frenching into the sorry sand
is all I want to think about, and the slippery red sun going down
O beauty, what do you do with it
after crying wolf about it for so long?
Let it turn into an overgrown lot
Put a firecracker up its arse
What do you say, Mr. Kind Eyes?
When the gang has you licked,
do not surrender. In your
worst night of dying damsels,
weep, but also befriend a tree.
Do not let them gore you of Zen
in that worst night, gondolier!
Hobble through the grit
thy vest made of spritzer,
hops, and the sun's tears.
There, in the back country of friends.
You say you're hungry for my body but what does that mean
Is it the way I want to be one
of the orange chunky clouds getting
whipped around? The wind whips everything around tonight, it has a will, it is crisp and regal
Only the constellations stay put, flat white pinups, always playing it cool.
I enter the crescendo
of those images, feel
the chariot that has driven
your hands. Light another,
another crinkling thing
doomed to burn up, then
be pondered. No.
I want to love you nobly,
then be forgotten.
This is how it goes, then,
the walk toward
union.
I twinkle
across the
distance, not
really knowing
your point of
view. Are we
the glass
the world pours
into, or is it
our love that
saturates
the world?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 29, 2025
Joint review with The Latest Winter:
Maggie Nelson's 'Shiner' and 'The Latest Winter, her two first poetry collections from 2001 and 2003 respectively, newly republished in 2018 by Zed Books, are the final two books l've read in 2018, and remind me why I loved reading three of her other books so much last year ('Bluets', 'The Red Parts' and 'The Argonauts'); her distinctly direct approach to language, her natural rhythms and ability to harbour the deepest intensities, permeate even her earliest writings, concerned as they are with love and grief and sickness and existentialism and terrorism (one collection pre-9/11, the other shortly after). 'Shiner' is heat and blood and closeness, while 'The Latest Winter' is cold and weather and distance, both in their own ways exploring the self amidst the sprawl of New York, first in a tone of self-discovery, then with a sense of loss and being overwhelmed. There are too many poems and lines to single out, so I'll stick to one: 'my life as an exchange student' from 'The Latest Winter', in which Nelson writes "those were the days of pepper trees, when / I was unsure if anyone would ever love me".
Maggie Nelson's 'Shiner' and 'The Latest Winter, her two first poetry collections from 2001 and 2003 respectively, newly republished in 2018 by Zed Books, are the final two books l've read in 2018, and remind me why I loved reading three of her other books so much last year ('Bluets', 'The Red Parts' and 'The Argonauts'); her distinctly direct approach to language, her natural rhythms and ability to harbour the deepest intensities, permeate even her earliest writings, concerned as they are with love and grief and sickness and existentialism and terrorism (one collection pre-9/11, the other shortly after). 'Shiner' is heat and blood and closeness, while 'The Latest Winter' is cold and weather and distance, both in their own ways exploring the self amidst the sprawl of New York, first in a tone of self-discovery, then with a sense of loss and being overwhelmed. There are too many poems and lines to single out, so I'll stick to one: 'my life as an exchange student' from 'The Latest Winter', in which Nelson writes "those were the days of pepper trees, when / I was unsure if anyone would ever love me".
March 7, 2024
well here we are … dabbling with book reviews. leave it to maggie nelson to pull it out of me!
granted i’ve only read argonauts (albeit three times) and this poetry collection from her …. i don’t think i’m the right reader for her writing. the complexity of her observations of life and human emotion are fantastic! validating! beautiful! necessary! but for the more academic minded - the validity of these emotions apparently must be backed up by theory and rhetoric. but for me, the existence of those emotions are enough. i want them called out. i don’t want them to be inaccessible. i don’t want them to be more complex and nebulous than they are. i turn to poetry to make sense of it!
some of these poems really hit for me (particularly: the condemned building, second avenue winter, a misunderstanding, and subway in march 5:45 pm) but idk about the rest
i think i’m gonna let it settle before rereading
granted i’ve only read argonauts (albeit three times) and this poetry collection from her …. i don’t think i’m the right reader for her writing. the complexity of her observations of life and human emotion are fantastic! validating! beautiful! necessary! but for the more academic minded - the validity of these emotions apparently must be backed up by theory and rhetoric. but for me, the existence of those emotions are enough. i want them called out. i don’t want them to be inaccessible. i don’t want them to be more complex and nebulous than they are. i turn to poetry to make sense of it!
some of these poems really hit for me (particularly: the condemned building, second avenue winter, a misunderstanding, and subway in march 5:45 pm) but idk about the rest
i think i’m gonna let it settle before rereading
January 5, 2019
Después de haber leído maravillas como The Latets Winter, Jane: A Murder o Bluets, este primer libro de Maggie Nelson me sabe a poco. Sin embargo, si su obra se tradujera al castellano (que eso espero, visto el éxito de Los Argonautas, y en un momento en el que por fin empiezan a llegar pequeñas ediciones de escritoras estadounidenses de la generación de Nelson) estaría bien traer algunos poemas de este libro porque ya apunta algunas de las cosas que más importan en la obra de Maggie Nelson: su humor, los temas complejos que trata —género, relaciones íntimas, política en USA, revisión del canon— y su manera de de escribir, tan ágil, que estallará en los libros siguientes y que yo, sin duda, os recomiendo.
December 3, 2020
GOD this was beautiful.
I would read maggie nelson's grocery lists.
"it's too hard to recall which it was -
that all sadness is really anger or all anger is really sadness."
"make it new, everyone kept saying,
so I gave up and made it mine."
"are we the glass the world pours into, or is it our love that saturates the world?"
"I am transporting an adorable succulent
the size of an infant's fist, holding it close as if
it were the one thing I had to keep alive
and thinking how much easier it would be
if all I had to love were this small plant
and then I wouldn't be so hard on you
and we could like the world before distrusting it."
I would read maggie nelson's grocery lists.
"it's too hard to recall which it was -
that all sadness is really anger or all anger is really sadness."
"make it new, everyone kept saying,
so I gave up and made it mine."
"are we the glass the world pours into, or is it our love that saturates the world?"
"I am transporting an adorable succulent
the size of an infant's fist, holding it close as if
it were the one thing I had to keep alive
and thinking how much easier it would be
if all I had to love were this small plant
and then I wouldn't be so hard on you
and we could like the world before distrusting it."
February 13, 2019
It's funny, for someone whose prose I adore and revere so highly... I'm not such a fan of Nelson's poetry. There are, of course, moments that sing -- the last poem, in particular, in this collection truly does capture the first push of spring in the city -- but ultimately this was a "fine" collection. Nothing exceptional, nothing horrible, just... poesy. Maybe it will grab you, in the ways that the collections I truly adore might not've grabbed you -- or maybe it's just worth it to see where the genius got her start.
March 9, 2023
Loved this collection by Maggie Nelson. I’ve read Bluets before so it is nice to see what she debuted! The poems were cohesively curated into this collection and I find that I really enjoy her writing. She divided up the collection into 3 parts - Carnegie Hall, Harbor, and After All. I think I enjoyed more poems in the last part…I dog-eared so many!
Some of my favorite poems in this collection:
- Sleepy Demise of the Season
- Mind
- Harbor
- Sunday Night
- Winding Down
- Subway in March, 5:45pm
Some of my favorite poems in this collection:
- Sleepy Demise of the Season
- Mind
- Harbor
- Sunday Night
- Winding Down
- Subway in March, 5:45pm
July 8, 2019
I wanted to like this collection because I normally really enjoy Nelson’s poetry, but this felt lack luster. There were a good five or so poems that I loved, but most of them fell flat for me. Some seemed like a stream of consciousness with no conclusion (and not in a way that makes you think) while others get even more disconnected. I was disappointed that I finished it without feeling as if I’d gained anything from the experience.
September 7, 2021
Listen, I am a HUGE fan of Maggie Nelson. As in, I think she is one of the best living writers. But this collection of poems (her first publication, circa 2001) does nothing for me. I felt like I was reading an MFA student’s notebook during the semester they took a class on the Beat Generation. It’s all frenzy, fracture, no punctuation, run-ons, shock and onomatopoeia. Maggie Nelson is a genius and this poetry is nevertheless Not My Thing.
April 14, 2021
The progression of the poems in this collection intrigues me; it's as if the form and the language of the work itself is slowly opening to the reader, gradually and deliberately becoming less opaque almost with each page. "After a Fight" and "Winding Down" are particular standouts, hinting at the lyric, shimmering slipperiness of Nelson's later and more well-known work.
July 24, 2022
"i woke up old and into happy uncertainty, the vitamins i feed to the streets, the real relations within a bead. oh pouring cylinder, stark uncertainty, racket of leaves helicoptering to their death -- my love is coming out over and over again. here it is, what i always wanted. the air spills ash; i suppose it is light"
Read
April 17, 2025maggie nelson has been such a looming figure on my horizons since every girl i knew started talking about how the argonauts had changed their lives (i believe this was age 19). i didn't love these poems, but i liked them, and enjoyed witnessing the seedlings of a poetic sensibility that has clarified in the interceding 20 (!) years since this debut collection
November 13, 2020
Maggie Nelson as a baby poet is kind of adorable — and you glimpse just what she will become. But there’s a lot of Eileen Myles in here. And Frank O’Hara. Just wait for Bluets — and the Red Parts. That’s where she sings.
September 27, 2024
“i twinkle across the distance, not really knowing your point of view. are we the glass the world pours into, or is it our love that saturates the world?”
a tip of the iceberg for what maggie nelson will eventually write. a few hard-hitters, line-wise. i like how she write about love
a tip of the iceberg for what maggie nelson will eventually write. a few hard-hitters, line-wise. i like how she write about love
Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews