Part elegy part true crime story this memoirinverse from the author of the awardwinning The Argonauts expands the notion of how we tell stories and what form those stories take through the story of a murdered woman and the mystery surrounding her last hours. Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelsons aunt Jane who was murdered in 1969 while a firstyear law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved Janes murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rapemurders in the area between 1967 and 1969. Nelson was born a few years after Janes death and the narrative is suffused with the long shadow her murder cast over both the family and her psyche. Exploring the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry prose dreamaccounts and documentary sources including local and national newspapers related true crime books such as The Michigan Murders and Killer Among Us and fragments from Janes own diaries written when she was 13 and 21 its eight sections cover Janes childhood and early adulthood her murder and its investigation the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelsons girlhood and sisterhood and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother Janes sister to retrace the path of Janes final hours. Each piece in Jane has its own form and the movement from each piece to the nextalong with the white space that surrounds each fragmentserve as important fissures disrupting the tabloid pageturner quality of the story and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood empathy identification and the essentially unknowable aspects of anothers life and death. Equal parts a elegy memoir detective story meditation on violence and serial sexual violence in particular and conversation between the living and the dead Janes powerful and disturbing subject matter combined with its innovations in genre shows its readers what poetry is capable ofwhat kind of stories it can tell and how it can