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. Jane explores 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 nextalong with the white space that
surrounds each fragmentserve 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. Part elegy, part memoir, detective story, part
meditation on violence (and serial, sexual violence in particular),
and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane s
powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its
innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can dowhat
kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them."
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