Ecco

80 pages, $15

When I first read Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, I was not suffering. I sat on my futon several years ago preparing for discussion of the text in my graduate workshop the following week, and I took in the book quietly and then I read it again and again, entirely consumed. I consumed Gluck’s sharp lines, her exacting verbs. (Her prosody will instruct young poets forever on the bold and crucial task of word choice, of the image so precise and correct that this reader dares to call them perfect.) I mourned, and found comfort in her bravery in the face of her own mourning- but when I read Wild Iris the first time, I was not suffering. Instead, I wore Gluck’s suffering like a coat in summer- puzzled by its trapping force, unsure I would ever need the thickness of its pain.  Continue reading →