Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009’s Bluets , Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life. In scrupulously distilled prose, Pathemata offers a tragicomic portrait of a particularly unnerving and isolating moment in recent history, as well as an abiding account of how it feels to inhabit a mortal body in struggle to connect with others. Formally inspired by Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers , and conceptually guided by Gilles Deleuze’s notion of artist as symptomologist, Pathemata is yet another urgent innovation from Maggie Nelson in the art of life-writing. In this thoughtful work, she excavates the duties of parenthood and care, bodies and ageing, loneliness and mortality. The narrative jumps in time, and the lines between reality, dreams and fiction blur. Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian Returning to the mind, Nelson puts the gnosis back in diagnosis—the mystery and confusion, the reverberations that pain sends through human relationships and through perception itself. The second half of the book’s title, “The Story of My Mouth,” invokes her vocation as a writer and the condition of being a woman with a lot to say.... Pathemata conveys the reader from plague to palate to parenting with searing images of lived details—no one else does it like Nelson. B. K. Fischer, LARB This unique work embodies its own definitions of hybridity responding to the conditions of its making—a pandemic, a history of mouth issues, a series of dentists, parenthood—as well as to Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers . This is “an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio” book. This is a Wave book. Fans of Nelson will want Pathemata on their shelves. RMF, Lit Hub Maggie Nelson  is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. She first published  Bluets  with Wave Books in 2009 - in 2015, the book was named by  Bookforum  one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years; in 2024, it was adapted into an acclaimed play staged at the Royal Court Theater of London. Her other nonfiction titles include  Like Love: Essays and Conversations  (2024),  On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint  (2021; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), the National Book Critics Circle Award winner  The Argonauts  (2015; named by the New York Times one of the top 100 books of the 21st Century),  The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning  (2011; named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year),  The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), and  Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions  (2007). Her poetry titles include  Something Bright, Then Holes  (2007), and  Jane: A Murder  (2005). A 2016 MacArthur “genius” fellow, she currently teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. Her newest,  Pathemata, or The Story of My Mouth , was published in April 2024.  I get up first to be alone, and also because my jaw hurts too much to stay in bed.       Each morning it is as if my mouth has survived a war—it has protested, it has hidden, it has suffered.   It has floated, its miniscule points of contact have hit and repelled, pain has shocked then pooled up around the joint.   Rather than each other, my teeth find cheek, which they masticate, leaving in their wake two mountainous ridges.   I shove the sheet into my mouth to know that I am still here, still rooted to the crust.       When H is home, which is about half of the time these days, I apologize to him for the white splotches on the comforter’s rim.   He says it’s okay, they just make him sad.   As I tiptoe to the kitchen, I “bite check,” which I’ve been instructed not to do, but I do it anyway, to make sure my top and bottom teeth are still in the same mouth, lost cousins of the same star.           He has pulled the car over on a rural highway to help a turtle cross the road.   We are on a blind incline, so there is a significant risk of them both getting hit by an oncoming car.   He treats the turtle with tenderness and urgency, more tenderness and urgency than he has ever shown toward me.   I wait in the passenger seat, watching the heat steam off the asphalt.   I don’t care if the turtle lives, but I pretend that I do.   I am trying to be loved.