American Originality: Essays on Poetry

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A luminous collection of essays from Louise Gl ck, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our most original and influential poets

Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Gl ck is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Gl ck's second book of essays--her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Gl ck's moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection.

From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Gl ck comprehends and destabilizes notions of "narcissism" and "genius" that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.

Author: Louise Glück
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 04/18/2017
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780374299552


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 11/01/2016 pg. 58
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2017
Publishers Weekly 01/16/2017
Library Journal 03/15/2017 pg. 118
Booklist 04/01/2017 pg. 12
Library Journal 11/01/2016

About the Author
Louise Glück is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a collection of 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 lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.