jane: a murder. ByMaggie Nelson. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2005. Pp. 200. $13.95 paper.

Jane Mixer was murdered in 1969. A student at the University of Michigan Law School, the twenty-three year old told her parents she was getting a ride from Ann Arbor to her parents' home in Muskegon on March 20. Her body was found in the rural Denton Cemetery near Ypsilanti the next day, lying on top of a grave. She had been shot and strangled. Jane Mixer was—or would have been—the aunt of the poet Maggie Nelson. It's an awkward construction: in her jane: a murder, Nelson refers to Mixer as her mother's sister, which is and is not the equivalent of claiming her as her aunt. The precision Nelson applies to this language of reference is important for the whole of jane: a murder, which poses difficult epistemological questions and struggles to resolve them by using poetic imagination to reconstruct the flotsam and jetsam of documentary remains, the scrap and trash left in the wake of ruin, the evidence of both what was once whole and how it was broken. By wondering if a woman who was murdered before she herself was born can be called her aunt, Nelson calls into question the limits of what the present can know about the past, and what presence can know about absence.

jane: a murder describes itself as a hybrid form, a blurred-genre experiment. This claim to hybridity is an increasingly common one, as poets draw more and more liberally from other genres and traditions. But Nelson does far more than skim the surface of alternative literary styles; jane earns its genuine hybridity by passing the test of formal origins. It cannot be said of this book that it is poetry that makes recourse of narrative fact; nor is it a memoir or tale of detection periodically adorned with lyric fancies. This book is something wholly other, with precedents visible only in the likes of Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid or Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead. Yet despite Nelson's debt to these earlier efforts to achieve a synthesis of poetry and fact (especially in the face of the inevitably data-evacuating properties of death), her work offers something superior to these precedents. Unlike Ondaatje, for whom imperfect facts are an invitation to imagination, or Rukeyser, who marshaled her poetic gifts in clear service to the most generous spirit of reportage, Nelson dissolves these categories and never quite resolves them. The result is not confusion, but rather a deeply unnerving form of clarity, one that acknowledges both the inevitability of our desire to know and the impossibility of realizing that desire to our satisfaction.

The chronological sequence of jane: a murder thus begins not quite with Jane Mixer's life, but with the effects of her death on the psyche of the poet. The initial section, titled "The Light of the Mind (Four Dreams)" begins with an unidentified "she" who has been shot twice in the head, and from whose wounds flow light, of which the woman asks "Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?"

The dream concludes:

So I was a genius after all! The thought made her smile, but then she wondered, Why had the light always been invisible? I must have been squandering it, I must have felt only its vaguest rotations. Now what can I do with it? If I could find a lampshade, someone could read by it. I might illuminate entire rooms, entire dungeons, I shine so bright.

But in fact she was losing the light; it leaked everywhere, unstoppable.

These dreams closely resemble the meditative lyric mode with which more traditional elegies begin. But the light that leaks everywhere, that proves unstoppable—this metaphor, in which the narrator's life offers illumination even as it disappears, suggests that this text will not be easily reconciled with the certainties of the elegiac posture. Nelson's desire to celebrate or at least elaborate Jane's life requires first that she know something about that life, and that in turn requires not just meditation but research.

This research, however, cannot be easily done, for the nature of absence challenges all efforts at detection and deduction. Consider "The Fire" from a section of the book titled "Figment":

According to family lore, there was a great bonfire in which all of Jane's possessions perished. Her journals, her clothes, her scrapbooks, her books, her typewriter, her school papers, her love letters. Her parents supposedly set this fire a few days after she was killed, when they went to Ann Arbor to clear out her things. The way my mother remembers the story, they set the fire outside her room at the Law Quad.

The Law Quad is a grassy, public area, traversed by several cement paths and surrounded by ivy-covered Gothic buildings, one of which is the main law library. Upon returning to the spot, my mother agrees that the idea of my grandparents, two very private people, setting a large bonfire there and feeding Jane's belongings to the flames seems unlikely.

But questions remain. Where was the story from, and where did the belongings go?

Questions remain: this is what compels detection and also signals its failure. If Nelson is driven to seek the information she needs in order to complete her inquiry, and in so seeking not only fails to find material evidence but encounters the even-more mystifying difficulties of subjectivity and memory, to what can she turn?

Among recourse to newspaper reports, interviews, police files and ghastly "true crime" books which feature Jane's murder, Nelson turns to Jane's own writing, her journals and diaries. In "The Box" Nelson writes, with lineation and enjambment characteristic of "conventional" poetry, that

The diary starts in January, 1960,
when Jane was thirteen, and runs
to October of 1961.
At this moment in my life
hate is so fierce
that I would give anything to kill my mother
she begins, already
on her way
to becoming a woman.

Note here how Nelson folds Jane's prose into the strictures of a poetic idiom. This isn't merely an aesthetic choice; it hints at an epistemological ethic. When Nelson composes "The Fire," the subjectivity of which seems to lend itself to the conventions of first-person narrative poetry, she establishes the story in prose, as if it were fact, when the point of the story is that it is anything but. Yet when employing an actual documentary source, even one as "authentic" as Jane's diary, Nelson coaxes the document into verse, via lineation. And the poetic reliance upon enjambment determines the sequence of the poems, and not just what occurs within them: "The Box" is followed by "(October 21 1960)", the text of which is derived wholly from Jane's diary, and then "Gushing," which bears partial quoting:

Jane was a gusher,
my mother says.
You know, a gusher—
"I really like your dress,
I really do, I mean it's adorable,
really and truly adorable."
I know about gushing, how charming
it can be, and how alarming
when it comes on strong:
I went over to Jan's Thursday nite and really spouted off.
Heidi and Suzie were there and they objected to my ideas, strenuously.

In only eleven lines, Nelson paraphrases her mother's paraphrase of Jane and then returns to the default of a poetic ego to respond to the paraphrase by citing text from Jane's own journal. Given the complexity of this arrangement, why further complicate the matter by injecting the pauses and interruptions of poetry? Because the effect of the formal poetic choices is to force the reader to recall that all this information has required arrangement, and that while it is not assembled arbitrarily, the assemblage does not equal "the facts." Inability to muster or master the full range of the facts is, in fact, what makes the assembly necessary. Nelson composes jane: a murder as dependent on a series of documents, but also documents their arrangement so as to never lose track of the sense of impossibility and incompleteness of her project. As the documentarian, Nelson cannot ever fully disappear from the edifice she constructs. Her agency is as central to the book as is its putative subject, and Nelson knows that she cannot begin to approach accuracy unless she takes this dynamic into account.

Coincident with the writing and publication of jane: a murder, new facts and new possibilities have emerged and resulted in a conviction of Jane Mixer's previously unknown assailant. Many of these facts deepen the mystery of Jane Mixer's death, rather than clarify it. Yet it is to Nelson's credit as a writer and recorder that these imperfect facts only make the accomplishment of jane: a murder stand in even greater relief. In her preface, she warns the reader that "although this a 'true story,' I make no claim for the factual accuracy of its representations of events or individuals." But she need not make that claim in order to have made an extraordinarily faithful and harrowing book. By decoupling the assumed relationship between facts and accuracy, Maggie Nelson creates a space for a different kind of accuracy, one loyal to irreconcilable dreams of perfect knowledge, and what—with care and skill—we can find sufficient to the demands those dreams make upon us.