"Bluets" starts with a love that has been lost, caring for a friend who has met with an accident and an obsession with the colour blue. The unnamed main character of the text has been left by the »prince of blue«. Her broken heart is juxtaposed by the tragedy of her friend, who is left quadriplegic after an accident and whom she now cares for. At the same time, she is pouring all her energy into her obsession for the colour blue.

Maggie Nelson’s book, a collection of 240 prose miniatures that was celebrated as a literary sensation, mixes the philosophical, the lyrical and the banal, observa- tions and reflections, personal experience and inventions, associations and research. The narrator's voice thus covers all shades and secrets of the colour blue. She guards her collection of blue objects with pride, knows all musicians and artists who have succumbed to blue: Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Derek Jarman and more. At the same time, however, she uses the colour in order to explore her grief over a lost love and her paralysed friend’s suffering.

Rarely has there ever been such a poetic and inspiring dissection of pain as the one Maggie Nelson delivered: a lyrical, philosophical and deeply personal exploration of one’s own capacity for suffering.