Verse chronicle December 2021
The dead & the naked
On new poetry by Louise Glück, August Kleinzahler, Rita Dove, Valzhyna Mort, Paul Muldoon & John Ashbery.
Louise Glück’s new poems have the simplicity of fairy tales. Winter Recipes from the Collective is an ungainly title for a book of fifteen poems ghostly, spectral, and often attenuated. They’re apparently rough drafts for Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm brothers.1 The tales are told simply, acidly, with a psychological weight only a writer like Glück, who says so much by saying so little, could manage—or bear.
Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
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