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Tells the story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson´s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969, via a collage of poetry and prose.

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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.

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Nelson, Maggie
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.

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