Nelson undergoes gruelling rounds of IVF and then becomes pregnant Dodge starts injecting testosterone and has top surgery, liberating him from years of painful chest-binding. Or reinforce it (unforgivable).” In the years that follow, they undergo dynamic shifts in their own bodies. “Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable).

They marry in a rush in the final hours before Prop 8 (the ruling that temporarily eliminated same-sex marriage in the state of California) passes, their sole witness a drag queen doing triple duty as the Hollywood chapel’s greeter and bouncer. Dodge is transgender, and not in accordance with the insistent media narrative of a man locked in a woman’s body, but rather someone who does not wish to traffic in binaries at all (“I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers”). She falls for Dodge’s brilliance, decency and immense sexual charisma, but during the early days of their courtship, she is not at all certain which pronoun her lover prefers to go by. The words “I love you” come in the very first paragraph, a confession uttered by Nelson to her debonair lover, the artist Harry Dodge. It is about love and marriage, motherhood, pregnancy, birth and family-making, and because it is a book by Maggie Nelson, it turns every one of these concepts on its head.

It is, after all, about love and its fruits: both the falling in love and the maintaining of affection, devotion, tenderness. The Argonauts is, likewise, resistant to summary, though describing it as a love story might come closest. They float across categories, now memoir, now poetry, now philosophy, now criticism, too fleet and witty and subtle to be pinned down. These books never quite settle into a fixed form. Previous works include a philosophical survey of heartbreak and the colour blue ( Bluets), two volumes about the abduction and murder of her aunt ( Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts), and the magnificently invigorating The Art of Cruelty, a study of avant-garde art that turns by degrees into an unflinching investigation into the nature of violence itself.

If you haven’t heard of her, it’s because she is yet to be published in the UK, from which one might conclude that British publishing is becoming too timid for its own good. Born in 1973, she has so far produced nine books, four of poetry and five of non-fiction, knitting together what might in heavier hands be abstruse theory and humid confession to create an exhilarating new language for considering both the messiness of life and the meanings of art.

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

Seanan mcguire in an absent dream