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Jane: A Murder Paperback – September 13, 2016

by Maggie Nelson (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 250 ratings
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Part elegy, part true crime story, this memoir-in-verse from the author of the award-winning The Argonauts expands the notion of how we tell stories and what form those stories take through the story of a murdered woman and the mystery surrounding her last hours.

Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Jane’s death, and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche.

Exploring the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, dream-accounts, and documentary sources, including local and national newspapers, related “true crime” books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us, and fragments from Jane’s own diaries written when she was 13 and 21, its eight sections cover Jane’s childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson’s girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane’s sister) to retrace the path of Jane’s final hours.

Each piece in Jane has its own form, and the movement from each piece to the next--along with the white space that surrounds each fragment--serve as important fissures, 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 another’s life and death. Equal parts a meditation on violence (serial, sexual violence in particular), and a conversation between the living and the dead, Jane’s powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, shows its readers what poetry is capable of--what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    200 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Soft Skull
  4. Publication date
    September 13, 2016
  5. Dimensions
    5 x 0.6 x 7.63 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1593766580
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1593766580
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Not only is this a brilliant and deeply felt book, it is also a fascinating and necessary coda to American culture’s obsession with serial killers." ––Nicola Maye Goldberg, CrimeReads

About the Author

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, scholar, and nonfiction writer. In 2016 she was received a MacArthur "genius" grant. She is the author of five books of nonfiction, including The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and was a New York Times bestseller; a landmark work of cultural, art, and literary criticism titled The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011), which was featured on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review and named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; the cult classic Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), which was named by Bookforum as one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years; a memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence titled The Red Parts (originally published by Free Press in 2007, reissued by Graywolf in 2016); and a critical study of painting and poetry titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa, 2007; winner, the Susanne M. Glassock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship). Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001). She has been the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. She lives in Los Angeles.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Soft Skull; Reissue edition (September 13, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1593766580
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1593766580
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.6 x 7.63 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 250 ratings

About the author

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Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson

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Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books in multiple genres. Her books of nonfiction include Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Graywolf Press, 2024), On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press, 2021), The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), global best-seller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; a landmark work of cultural, art, and literary criticism titled The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011), which was named a NY Times Notable Book of the Year; the cult classic Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), which was named by Bookforum one of the 10 best books of the past 20 years; a memoir about her family, media spectacle, and sexual violence titled The Red Parts (originally published by Free Press in 2007, reissued by Graywolf in 2016); and a critical study of painting and poetry titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa, 2007; winner, the Susanne M. Glassock Award for Interdisciplinary Scholarship). Her books of poetry include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007), Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001). She has been the recipient of a Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and an Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant. In 2016 she received a MacArthur "genius" grant. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
250 global ratings
Beautiful. Human. Poetic.
5 Stars
Beautiful. Human. Poetic.
At first I wasn’t sure aboutthis book, but it’s a really quick read and after I finished I was stunned by how quietly beautiful, sad, and ultimately humanizing it was.Really an amazing way to explore such a personal yet painfully public event.Definitely recommend to anyone interested in: poetry, true crime, psychology.And maybe this is my own weird thing, and I know I’m about to compare it to a fiction story, but this really made me think of The Diary of Laura Palmer. I read it earlier in 2017 and it also had a sad, poetic, deeply human core that I identified with. Anyway. Read this one! It will take you max three hours!
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Top reviews from the United States

Dawn Copley
5.0 out of 5 stars Hooked on Maggie Nelson
Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2017
Verified Purchase
Wow! Murder mind is a phrase I will not ever forget after reading all about the aunt of Maggie Nelson thought at first to be killed along with others in the 1969-1970 Michigan Murders. Unfortunately for her Aunt Jane and the rest of the family there was no closure in the case until 35 years after Jane's death.
Maggie was about to release a poetic, journal, type memoir of the Aunt she never knew and go on a book tour when the old Sheriff called and said they found the killer and the trial would be next week !
Once more the family would have to go through the horrors of a brutal murder trial . Maggie Nelson does an excellent job writing about the feelings that go through her mind and she tries very hard to place you right in the middle of the conflicting family relationships that such stress asituation I could never imagine could happen . She writes clearly , precisely and sometimes bluntly about all of the details in the case which is definitely a difficult situation with which to pressure yourself to write so objectively as it seems Maggie Nelson holds it together. This was the first book about the details of her own research into the murder . She did go on to publish a memoir from some journals , poems and added poetry and comments about the way Maggie and her family felt throughout the whole ordeal. Maggie is also well known for writing Jason and the Argonauts!
4 people found this helpful
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Julia Irzyk
5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing peek into an amazing life
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2011
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When a person is murdered, that single fact frequently overshadows the person they were or could have become. In Jane:A Murder, Maggie Nelson gives us a glimpse into her Aunt Jane's life via her Jane's diary entries, stories told by family and friends, and through Maggie Nelson's own poetry. What comes through is a life cut tragically short. Jane had a depth and clarity of thought as a teenager that I am still yet to achieve in my 30's. She was a social activist, a brilliant writer, and so much more than a headline.

I literally cried in certain places and devoured the book in less than 24 hours. I was unable to walk away from Jane. I wanted to know more. But tragically there is no more, and it makes what thoughts of hers that we do have all the more precious.

One of the ten best books I've ever read.
6 people found this helpful
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Kindle Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Poetey
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2017
Rated 4 stars for imagery. This is a quick read. Prose poetry is an interesting format for this type of story.
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@makeandcollect
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful. Human. Poetic.
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2018
Verified Purchase
At first I wasn’t sure aboutthis book, but it’s a really quick read and after I finished I was stunned by how quietly beautiful, sad, and ultimately humanizing it was.

Really an amazing way to explore such a personal yet painfully public event.

Definitely recommend to anyone interested in: poetry, true crime, psychology.

And maybe this is my own weird thing, and I know I’m about to compare it to a fiction story, but this really made me think of The Diary of Laura Palmer. I read it earlier in 2017 and it also had a sad, poetic, deeply human core that I identified with. Anyway. Read this one! It will take you max three hours!
Customer image
@makeandcollect
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful. Human. Poetic.
Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2018
At first I wasn’t sure aboutthis book, but it’s a really quick read and after I finished I was stunned by how quietly beautiful, sad, and ultimately humanizing it was.

Really an amazing way to explore such a personal yet painfully public event.

Definitely recommend to anyone interested in: poetry, true crime, psychology.

And maybe this is my own weird thing, and I know I’m about to compare it to a fiction story, but this really made me think of The Diary of Laura Palmer. I read it earlier in 2017 and it also had a sad, poetic, deeply human core that I identified with. Anyway. Read this one! It will take you max three hours!
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5 people found this helpful
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Anya
5.0 out of 5 stars stunning
Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2010
Verified Purchase
I bought this book for a poetry workshop class about the melding of different genres into poetry, and this book blew my mind. Part memoir, prose, poetry, investigative story and all sorts of haunting, this book was fantastic.
3 people found this helpful
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Amanda
3.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, annoyingly organized
Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2015
Verified Purchase
This work has many aesthetically pleasing poems and vignettes. I also really love how Nelson plays with form. However, on the kindle specifically, it was so hard to tell when who was speaking. I wish the font or labels were used. There would be dates around passages but I wasn't sure if they went with the previous or latter passage, and it ended up annoying me. I've read Bluets by Nelson, and I found it to be much more beautifully written and organized. Loving that book so much, I would just have to say this one is "OK."
2 people found this helpful
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Laura S. Levitt
5.0 out of 5 stars A Powerful, Haunting, and sobering book about grief and loss
Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2005
Verified Purchase
Maggie Nelson is an extraordinary writer. She is able to convey complexity in the sparces of prose/poetry. Her book is griping. You cannot stop reading even as you are horrified and pained by what she has to tell you. And what she has to tell is very much about how loss, painful loss crosses generations. This is a book very much about grief across generations in a single American family. Maggie does not prettify the range of emotions that come with tragic loss. She is not afraid to show the rage as well as the sorrow and how these emotions are mixed and intermingled.
15 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2021
Verified Purchase
This strange, spare work based on memories, journal fragments, bits of evidence, empathy, and imagination will break your heart. But, it will also make you celebrate a young woman’s life. A stunning act of restoration.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Rene J Perez
5.0 out of 5 stars Total page turner
Reviewed in Canada on August 29, 2023
Verified Purchase
Besides being very easy and delightful to read, it is heartbreaking, terrifying, and beautifully dim in all the best ways. It really brings you into the mind of this poor yet vivacious woman, and makes you ponder on how quickly life can take a huge unexpected and tragic turn, compelling the reader to treasure the beauty in the human soul, and how timeless and effervescent it is compared to the inevitable destruction of the physical vessel (body). I relished in the showcase of “Jane” and her exciting, bubbly passion for life, whilst feeling the gut-wrenching fate creeping up on her through each page, and the melancholy honouring of her life by the author.
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Anna Blume
1.0 out of 5 stars A quick read for stream of consciousness fans
Reviewed in Germany on September 27, 2020
Verified Purchase
I bought this book as kindle version. I am happy about that, so I won't have a physical copy of this book cluttering my flat.

The only positive thing: A short read.
Otherwise a mixture of newspaper scraps etc. and thoughts floating through the author's mind. Likely being conceived while being tired on a train and hovering between being hardly awake and (day) dreaming?

Only recommendable for lovers of this genre / style. Otherwise: A severe case of waste of time and money.
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G. Stephens
5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary and intimate musings
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2019
Verified Purchase
I loved this book, it's enthralling and tragic and beautiful. Nelson reveals such an intimate side of her family's history; by the end of the book you feel like you know both her and her aunt Jane. I genuinely feel privileged to have read this book. This intimate rumination on an event, on a woman and her family and the repercussions this event had is astounding. We're taken through dreams, Jane's childhood journal, news reports and Nelson's reflections and memories and throughout lies a haunting juxtaposition of the brutality of murder against the zest of two intelligent bright burning women; that of Jane and her niece.
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K.P.
5.0 out of 5 stars Compulsive read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2021
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Fascinating and difficult to read at times, but thoroughly worthwhile
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C H
2.0 out of 5 stars Response summary
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2017
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Maggie Nelson, a literary academic is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of them have become cult classics. Jane a murder is based on the murder of Jane Nelson’s aunt in March 1969 who was fatally shot in the head. The material is taken from Jane’s childhood diary written between 1960-1961, Jane’s journal pages when she was at college around 1966, Nelsons own poetry and inserts documented sources.

Jane’s murder was the third in a series of seven. The killer was apprehended and sent to prison. The book shreds some doubt on whether the right killer was charged for Jane’s murder. This causes an unsatisfactory ending to the book as the real killer is not produced.

In the epistle Nelson writes that writing this book ‘is therapy for me.’ Signifying that the murder of her aunt, although occurring years before she was born had a monumental effect on her life. She begins the book under the section title The light of the mind (four dreams). This implies that the following prose were dreams of Nelsons.

The next section titled Figment - Nelson analyses the history of the word and the exact meaning of figment. Her grandfather had asked a reasonable question in response to Nelson telling him she's going to write a book about Jane (his daughter). “What will it be a figment of your imagination?” Nelson(2005,p.23) As a writer/reader I didn’t understand Nelsons viewpoint on the conversation as her Grandfather’s question seemed perfectly logical to me.

The collection of material is like looking through someones scrapbook. It’s interesting, maybe slightly haunting but a reader could feel robbed of their hard earned money. It seems more of a flick through than a sit down and read as the pages are sparse. Disappointingly the (scrap) book doesn't provide a cliff hanger or a provide any new information on the murder.
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