Winter Recipes from the Collective - by Louise Glück (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A haunting book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes

Louise Glück's thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister's death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts.

"Some of you will know what I mean," the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, "all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last." This magnificent book couldn't have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life.

Review Quotes

Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times, Irish Times, Library Journal, Lit Hub, and NPR

"An exquisitely small collection--the way an atom that contains the world is small--that further solidifies Glück's place as one of the eminent poets of our time . . . These recipes for winter offer a robust meal that feeds both spirit and soul, about the nature of life, and time, prepared by one of our finest poets." --Mandana Chaffa, The Chicago Review of Books

"[Winter Recipes from the Collective] is refreshing in its willingness to confront the uncertainties and anxieties ignited by our current predicament, in which predictions of our collective future alternate between the terrifying and the inscrutable . . . Reading Glück's new poems is a joyful experience, as reading great poetry always is." --Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post

"Winter Recipes from the Collective is . . . a book of fifteen poems ghostly, spectral, and often attenuated . . . These poems have the contemplative force and invitation of haiku. They start deep and sink deeper, happy to be as prosy and plain as a Midwestern summer. This is a brilliant, scary book." --William Logan, The New Criterion

"This is an intensely technical book and a work of extreme concision, in which complicated feelings have been pared down to their minimum and a life's worth of experience reduced to strange, sometimes tender and sometimes ominous detail." --Anahid Nersessian, The New York Review of Books

"[Glück is] a masterful writer who delights in weaving surprises into her poetry. She does not serve up easy interpretations or convenient summaries. And, for a poet who is accused of being too cool for her own good, Glück frequently dabbles in warmth and humor, both qualities amply displayed in this volume." --Robert Israel, The Arts Fuse

"Glück's work builds on an inquiring sense of wonder over our human experience and fortitude . . . The Nobel committee praised the 'austere beauty' of Glück's poems; this marvelous collection adds warmth and wit." --Raúl Niño, Booklist (Starred Review)

"[Glück is] a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that's really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage . . . [Winter Recipes from the Collective] examines close relationships without the sweetener of correct sentiment, recording the universal stages of human life through a woman's experience." --Fiona Sampson, The Guardian (UK)

"It seems to me that Glück's preoccupations are what poetry is for . . . [Her voice] is dazzlingly, thrillingly cold, like the coldness of nights we call glittering." --Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

"[Winter Recipes from the Collective] mines the variegated beats of human existence for something shared and intimate . . . beckoning the reader to enter in conversation with one of the great poets of our times." --Kevin Lozano, Vulture

"Glück considers a primary human loneliness in humane, reflective poems that are deeply engaged with the idea of being alone with oneself . . . With this magnificent collection, a great poet delivers a treatise on how to live and die." --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Louise Glück speaks in softer voices in her first post-Nobel collection . . . [T]here is an unlikely kind of comfort here, as well as a kind of dark resolve, the knowledge that luck and joy are always fleeting . . . Reading her, I feel much less alone." --Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

"Aside from the complex emotional tenor of these poems, what makes them so readable is the narration--image succeeding image in a convincing flow of perception--and Glück's agile free verse . . . Casual yet perfect, conversational yet inevitable, the verse fully formed yet informal, Glück . . . is a master of lyric narrative." --William Doreski, Harvard Review

"Robert Frost said the work of poetry is 'getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued.' After half a century of sizing up the dangers that disturb the soul, Glück is tending to the redemptive part of the poet's mission." --Andrew Chan, 4 Columns

"Glück's images are crisp and fable-like, her language deceptively accessible, but her poems resist any kind of definitive interpretation: You have to decide what they mean for yourself." --Irene Katz Connelly, Forward

About the Author

Louise Glück is the author of over fifteen books of poems and essays. Her many awards include the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2015 National Humanities Medal, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the 2014 National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the 2001 Bollingen Prize, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962-2012, and the 2008 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and Stanford University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.