*Bluets* by Maggie Nelson Beijing United Publishing Company

Synopsis · · · · · ·
🩸"The only thing I fear more than pain and its cruelty is numbness."

The latest work by Maggie Nelson, author of "Bluets" and "The Argonauts"

Sixteen years later, "Bluets" echoes and variations

🏥 A private chronicle combining medical diaries, dream fragments, and memory flashbacks,

👄 In pain and disorder, recalling memories, desires, and love that cannot be abandoned.

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From 2020 to 2023, the pandemic shattered the continuity of time and space, and broke the accustomed order of people's lives. For Maggie Nelson, everything was also quietly disintegrating: mouth pain that remained undiagnosed despite repeated treatments, emotional estrangement from her partner, the sudden death of a close friend, and frequent flashbacks of old traumas... The pain spread in her mouth, like a lurking language, approaching daily yet always inexpressible. So she responded to this journey of speechlessness with writing, penning "Pain, or the Story of My Mouth."

In this book of profound suffering, Nelson weaves together daily life, dreams, memories, and physical sensations around the theme of mouth pain, attempting to capture the fluid and shifting nature of pain with words—pain that is not only physiological but also cultural, emotional, and structural.

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[Editor's Recommendation]

🩹 Maggie Nelson, author of "Bluets" and "The Argonauts," presents her latest life narrative, where the body becomes poetry.

*Using "mouth pain" as a thread, from the metallic foreign sensation of a frenectomy to the misaligned occlusion of dreams and reality during the pandemic, Nelson portrays the body as a battlefield for pain, intimacy, and the struggle of language.

*She continues her characteristic "sharpness and tenderness," intertwining medical records, dream fragments, and cultural metaphors to write a modern allegory of the difficulty of expression and the pain of existence.

🩹 The true sequel to "Bluets," reconstructing the philosophical map of pain through fragmented narrative.

*Sixteen years later, Nelson continues to respond to the emotional themes of "Bluets" in a fragmented style, linking pain and love within a broader, more contemporary historical and cultural context, achieving an introspection and analysis of intimate relationships, historical trauma, and life experiences.

*Individual pain acts as a prism, reflecting the collective anxiety of speechlessness and emotional rifts in the post-pandemic era.

🩹 A specimen of pain in the pandemic era: when personal medical records become an X-ray of the spirit of the times.

*During the lockdown in Los Angeles, she documented the physical pain of her "teeth like estranged cousins" while witnessing the rapid decline of her friend C's life due to cancer.

*When "Zoom meetings," "COVID panic," and "medical disorder" are embedded in a personal narrative, the inexpressible pain in her mouth and the inflammation of the social organism form an intertextual relationship, becoming the most honest testament to pain in the 2020s.

🩹 Binding as a visual translation of pain: the synaesthetic aesthetic designed by Sankawa.

*106×176mm hardcover small format, easy to hold, subtly echoing the "intimacy of pain"; the flowing texture of the cover resembles the tremor of a dislocated jaw, conveying the sensory experience of "pain."

*The binding design itself becomes part of the reading, a silent response to "inexpressible pain," and a tactile resonance between literature and the body.