Jane explores the nature of this haunting incident via a collage of poetry, prose, and documentary sources, including newspapers, related ''true crime'' books such as The Michigan Murders and Killers Among Us, and fragments from Jane's own diaries written when she was 13 and 21. Its eight sections cover Jane's childhood and early adulthood, her murder and its investigation, the direct and diffuse effect of her death on Nelson's girlhood and sisterhood, and a trip to Michigan Nelson took with her mother (Jane's sister) to retrace the path of Jane's final hours. Each piece in Jane has its own form that serves as an important fissure, disrupting the tabloid, ''page-turner'' quality of the story, and eventually returning the reader to deeper questions about girlhood, empathy, identification, and the essentially unknowable aspects of another's life and death. Part elegy, part memoir, part detective story, part meditation on violence, and part conversation between the living and the dead, Jane's powerful and disturbing subject matter, combined with its innovations in genre, expands the notion of what poetry can do - what kind of stories it can tell, and how it can tell them.