{"id":710,"date":"2015-10-14T14:38:26","date_gmt":"2015-10-14T14:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoinreads\/?p=710"},"modified":"2015-10-14T14:38:26","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T14:38:26","slug":"marieke-van-der-steenhoven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/2015\/10\/14\/marieke-van-der-steenhoven\/","title":{"rendered":"Marieke Van Der Steenhoven"},"content":{"rendered":"

All spring and summer a dear friend insisted that I read Maggie Nelson\u2019s\u00a0The Argonauts<\/em>. She didn\u2019t give me much by way of recommendation but that it was short, that it seriously changed her brain and that she wanted to talk about it. Four months later I bought a copy. A month later I finally opened it up. Two days later I had devoured every last word and started rereading.<\/p>\n

Nelson is a poet, critic, nonfiction writer, and teacher at CalArts\u2019 MFA writing program.\u00a0The Argonauts\u00a0<\/em>is her latest book and follows works of poetry, art and cultural criticism, and autobiography. The front flap describes\u00a0The Argonauts<\/em>\u00a0as a work of \u201cautotheory\u201d about gender, sexuality, queer family, maternity, and the limits and possibilities of language. The narrative is anchored in Nelson\u2019s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered. She writes about her relationship with Dodge, Dodge\u2019s son, her own pregnancy, and the growth of their family.<\/p>\n

The Argonauts<\/em>\u00a0is a memoir that asks whether words are \u201cgood enough\u201d to express the complexity of life (see above: sexuality, gender, etc.).\u00a0\u00a0And honestly, her writing makes me feel like they are. Nelson seamlessly weaves colloquial banter (read: %&*#) and heady theory. She calls up Emerson, Sontag, Butler, Foucault, and many others in a way that makes those complex works wholly accessible and actually readable. Like lying in bed with a cup of coffee readable (as opposed to, say, pencil in hand, hunched over a desk readable).<\/p>\n

The Argonauts\u00a0<\/em>is about love and identity and the limits and possibilities of language in the 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century. Honestly, I fall short of having the words to fully articulate how and why I love this book. But I have pushed it onto others (like I\u2019m pushing it onto you now, Reader) using the same recommendation my friend gave me: it\u2019s short, it changed my brain, and I want to talk about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All spring and summer a dear friend insisted that I read Maggie Nelson\u2019s\u00a0The Argonauts. She didn\u2019t give me much by way of recommendation but that it was short, that it seriously changed her brain and that she wanted to talk about it. Four months later I bought a copy. A month later I finally opened … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Marieke Van Der Steenhoven”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-readers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}