The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Nelson, Maggie. "Spirit." From Jane: A Murder. Soft Skull, 2016.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Maggie Nelson is an American writer best known for her award-winning novel The Argonauts (2015), which earned the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel demonstrates Nelson's propensity for mixing genres in her work, as it incorporates elements of autobiography, memoir, poetry, theory, and literary criticism within a markedly avant-garde structure. As a writer, Nelson is known for challenging generic conventions and drawing heavily on queer, feminist, and aesthetic theory.

"Spirit" is just one poem in a broader collection of poetry entitled Jane: A Murder, published in 2005. This collection attempts to tell the story – part memoir, part murder mystery – surrounding the murder of Nelson's aunt Jane that occurred only a few years before Nelson was born. Jane was a first-year law student at the University of Michigan when she was brutally raped and murdered, the third in a series of seven similar crimes that occurred in the area between 1967 and 1969. However, Jane's case is officially unsolved, and the collection takes up this lack of resolution to focus on Jane's seemingly spectral presence over her family in the wake of her death. "Spirit," in particular, dramatizes the speaker's discomfort after hearing that the spirit of Jane "lives on" through her; she imagines that the two are indelibly and perhaps ominously connected despite never having been alive at the same time.