Abstract

‘Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation’
Olivia Laing

In this electrifying and raw debut anthology, Maggie Nelson unpicks the everyday with the quick alchemy and precision of her later modern classics The Argonauts and Bluets. The poems of Shiner experiment with a variety of styles—syllabic verse, sonnets, macaronic translation, Zen poems, walking poems—to express love, bewilderment, grief, and beauty. This book, Nelson’s first, heralded the arrival of a fully formed, virtuoso voice.

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

‘Shiner is totally cool. Maggie Nelson delivers the goods with fiendish delight.’
Eileen Myles

Praise for The Argonauts:

‘I read The Argonauts in one breathless, tearful, mind-blown day and I'm still recovering’
Miranda July

‘Nelson's writing is fluid – to read her story is to drift dreamily among her thoughts’
Huffington Post

‘Nelson is so outrageously gifted a writer and thinker’
Washington Post

‘Maggie Nelson writes like no one else on the planet’
Jezebel

‘Maggie Nelson [is] so much better than anything I've read for a long, long time’
Karl Ove Knausgaard

‘One of the great gifts of Nelson’s writing is how it embodies the process of her mind at work’
Los Angeles Review of Books