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A review by jarrahpenguin
Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems by Louise Glück
4.0
Fresh off her 2020 Nobel Prize, Louise Glück brings us a short, spare collection of poetry meditating on themes of death and mortality. The poems are clear and stripped of everything non-essential, coming across on the page as one set of animal tracks on a field of fresh snow. I was surprised by how prose-y most of it felt; without the enjambment and stanza construction almost any of the poems could've stood as the first paragraphs of a novel or short story. While I wasn't personally deeply moved or provoked by the poems, there were some particularly impressive stanzas. The one that I'll probably remember most is this end of the poem "Night Thoughts:"
All too soon I emerged
my true self,
robust but sour,
like an alarm clock.