Finding Jane: Lyric Individualism, True Crime, and Maggie Nelson’s Multiplicity

Abstract

n March 20, 1969, Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane disappeared. Seeking a ride to her family home in Muskegon from the University of Michigan for spring break, Jane Louise Mixer had posted a note on a community bulletin board and, on the designated evening, was picked up by the responding driver. The next morning, a local woman found the twentythreeyearold law student strangled, dead, leaning against a tombstone in a cemetery off the side of the road. “[F]our years later, almost to the day,” Nelson was born (Jane 28). In 2005, at the start of a new century, a new millennium―and after a new suspect was charged with the crime―she published a collection of poems titled Jane: A Murder, an attempt to grapple with the loss of the aunt she never met and the truths she left behind. Nelson’s interest in her aunt’s murder began when she herself was twentythree years old, the cosmic force of recurring dreams pulling them together after Nelson discovered her aunt’s old diaries, initially mistaking them for her own. This encounter propels Nelson toward an exploration of her aunt’s disappearance and murder through lyrical meditation and experimentation. In Jane and the follow up The Red Parts (2007), Nelson commits to a praxis of continued return, a method for examining D I A N A F I L A R