For his bookshop and website One Grand Books, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is Maggie Nelson, author of “The Argonauts” and a 2016 MacArthur fellow, who shares her list exclusively with T.

“Collected Works,” Lorine Niedecker

Niedecker lived most of her life in Blackhawk Island, a remote and marshy setting in Wisconsin, where she scrubbed hospital floors and cared for her deaf mother while writing some of the most quixotic, minimalist, moving poems of the 20th century. I know many by heart, like this one: “My friend tree / I sawed you down / but I must attend / an older friend / the sun,” but I still wouldn’t want to be without the hard copy.

“Breathturn,” Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris

This book brought me to poetry; I could never read it enough. Celan’s poems are a radiant reminder of the most desolate events that can attend humankind (i.e. the Holocaust, suicidal despair) and its most resplendent features (the near mystical possibilities of poetic language, of intimacy). “Single counter- / swimmer, you / count them, touch them / all.’”

“The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin

I know, I know, it’s made it onto a lot of lists. But there’s simply no substitute for this model of lucidity and complexity, the virtues of thinking out loud, and ethical, literary and autobiographical inquiry.