Louise Gl ck is the author of twelve books of poems and two essay collections. Her many awards include the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and Stanford University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An ageing soul's lyrical book of days ... The title poem will break your heart every time you read it but also affirm you in the toughest moments ... When Gluck takes a broader look, the scope can be truly epical; when she looks inward you can sometimes hear your own voice. And her tenderness is breathtaking. -- Ilya Kaminsky * Library Journal * An important collection...Averno has the feeling of an urgent inner dialogue between the believer and the skeptic. * Boston Review * [An] intense and ambitious collection. * Guardian * Few poets can shoulder the weight of the myth the way Gluck does...The poems brilliantly display a poet's insight, a mother's warmth, and a mortal's empath. There is wry humour, too, and, amid much that is dark, there are fragments of hope. * New Yorker * Brilliant [poems of] complex, haunting power... Averno may be Gluck's masterpiece. Certainly it demonstrates that she is writing at the peak of her powers. -- Nicholas Christopher * New York Times Book Review *