Winter Recipes from the Collective

May 1, 2021

Recently appointed poetry editor at the Nation, Iranian American poet/scholar Akbar follows up his corrosively beautiful debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, with Pilgrim Bell, a courageous spiritual journey that captures the addict's ongoing struggle and the challenges of being Muslim in an Islamophobic nation. Bidart, whose multiple awards include a Pulitzer, tops off five decades of writing with a book arguing Against Silence in its embrace of the world. In Winter Recipes from the Collective, her first collection since winning the Nobel Prize, Gl�ck joins voices together in a sort of chamber work to investigate loss, memory, and the quiet stride toward mortality (50,000-copy first printing). Former U.S. Poet Laureate, Smith offers her first retrospective with Such Color, selecting works from four previous volumes while continuing to push boundaries with her new poems. Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, previously director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and poetry editor at The New Yorker, Young revisits places and people leaving holes in his life in Stones.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 8, 2021

With her 13th collection, Nobel winner Gl�ck (Faithful and Virtuous Night) returns to the spare, whispered lyrics for which she is known, poems that gently probe the borders of knowing ("we cannot be certain/ we have yet to experience the end") and express the simple but startling revelations that come with age ("There is no one alive anymore/ who remembers me as a baby"). They might take the form of curiously disembodied conversations--with a sister, friend, teacher--or of fairy tales peopled by real humans "waiting to be transformed" in ways that remain unknown, undefined. Fleetingly, sometimes wittily philosophical ("Insight, my sister says./ Now it is here./ But hard to see in the darkness"), Gl�ck measures the weight of the external world against the interior's ("How heavy my mind is, / filled with the past./ Is there room enough/ for the world to penetrate?") and--alas--finds it wanting: "And I say I'm glad I dream/ the fire is still alive." VERDICT Inherently reticent, like oysters opening ever so slowly, these poems are reluctant to display their pearls, but patient readers will discern an opalescence they may have missed on the first reading.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2021
In her first new collection since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, Gl�ck returns to themes of mortality and nature; she also addresses ageing. In ""The Denial of Death,"" a concierge, a spectral gentleman, addresses the abandoned narrator, "Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey, / not into the world, like your friend's, but into yourself and your memories." Gl�ck's work builds on an inquiring sense of wonder over our human experience and fortitude. If not for her tender, sometimes funny lines, one might mistake her for a pessimist. In ""Night Thoughts,"" she images herself as an infant, "Was I a good baby? A / bad?" Thinking of the adults that were there then, "How hard it was / to be alive, no wonder / they all died." Gl�ck's wryness is grounded in the common actuality of being. In ""Song,"" the poet muses on a potter, "Leo thinks that things man makes / are more beautiful / than what exists in nature," to which her reply is, "and I say no. / And Leo says / wait and see." The Nobel committee praised the ""austere beauty" of Gl�ck's poems; this marvelous collection adds warmth and wit.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.