Maggie Nelson is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. She first published Bluets with Wave Books in 2009 - in 2015, the book was named by Bookforum one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years; in 2024, it was adapted into an acclaimed play staged at the Royal Court Theater of London. Her other nonfiction titles include Like Love: Essays and Conversations (2024), On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts (2015; named by the New York Times one of the top 100 books of the 21st Century), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007), and Jane: A Murder (2005). A 2016 MacArthur "genius" fellow, she currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Her newest, Pathemata, or The Story of My Mouth, was published in April 2025.

"In this thoughtful work, she excavates the duties of parenthood and care, bodies and ageing, loneliness and mortality. The narrative jumps in time, and the lines between reality, dreams and fiction blur."
--Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian
"Returning to the mind, Nelson puts the gnosis back in diagnosis--the mystery and confusion, the reverberations that pain sends through human relationships and through perception itself. The second half of the book's title, "The Story of My Mouth," invokes her vocation as a writer and the condition of being a woman with a lot to say.... Pathemata conveys the reader from plague to palate to parenting with searing images of lived details--no one else does it like Nelson."
--B. K. Fischer, LARB
"This unique work embodies its own definitions of hybridity responding to the conditions of its making--a pandemic, a history of mouth issues, a series of dentists, parenthood--as well as to Hervé Guibert's The Mausoleum of Lovers. This is 'an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio' book. This is a Wave book. Fans of Nelson will want Pathemata on their shelves."
--RMF, Lit Hub

Publisher: Wave Books

Pub date: 2026-04-07

Length: 80 pages