5.0

Surely one of the best works a Nobel laureate has released right after winning the prize. These poems read like extended koans or elliptical parables. Glück has always been a master of tying off her poems with a lacerating flourish, sometimes with a gesture so abrupt yet so incisive it pinions the reader, who must slowly remove its barbed point in order to look at it fully and understand its wry cruelty.