The book I give to people who say they don't like poetry is not a poetry book. It's Maggie Nelson's Bluets, which is numbered propositions — 240 of them, short, sometimes two sentences, sometimes two pages — organized around the color blue and grief and desire and Wittgenstein. It reads like neither prose nor poetry. It reads like someone thinking.

Nelson's other work — The Argonauts, Argonauts — operates in a similar register: hybrid, associative, intellectually demanding without being obstructed. She is the writer who most exemplifies for me the essay as a form of investigation rather than exposition.

Bluets is 95 pages. It takes about 90 minutes to read. The 90 minutes contains more than most novels contain in 300 pages.