The latest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Louise Glück, is an American poet whose verse is accessible and straightforward – no deliberate obscurity or arcane allusions or off-putting architectural stanzas. There’s an almost plain-spoken intimacy to much of her writing. She crafts insights into relatable subjects – domestic relationships, family life, aging, death – by writing about observable, quotidian things like birds, gardens, bedrooms. The New York Times recently published an admiration of Gluck’s work which celebrated it for not being nice. And it’s true: if poetry is going to engage with this world, it can’t afford always to be nice.

Ararat

The Wild Iris

Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry

The First Four Books of Poems

Meadowlands

The Seven Ages

Averno

Poems 1962-2002

Faithful and Virtuous Night

And if you’ve already read Glück and want to expand your horizons with some other recent and not-as-recent Nobel-winning writers, the Library’s got you covered:

Repetition

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

eBook   |   eAudiobook

Never Let Me Go

eBook   |   eAudiobook

The Unwomanly Face of War

eBook

So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood

hoopla

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

eAudiobook