American Originality
Essays on Poetry
ISBN10: 0374537461
ISBN13: 9780374537463
Trade Paperback
208 Pages
$17.00
CA$23.00
Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück’s second book of essays—her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück’s moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection.
From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of “narcissism” and “genius” that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.
Reviews
Praise for American Originality
"This slim volume of essays, the author’s second, addresses the practice of poetry in America with mesmerizing authority. In the guise of a critic, Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience, but she is also darkly funny about poetry’s temptation toward grandiosity."—Radhika Jones, The New York Times
"When one of the nation’s great living poets sets her observational eye on the state of the American letters—poetry specifically—it is for all of us to pay attention . . . Glück is an essayist at once generous and sharp, and her insights into craft, classic American poetry, and the souls of the poets, are essential reading."—Jonny Diamond, LitHub
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
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AMERICAN ORIGINALITY
We are, famously, a nation of escaped convicts, younger sons, persecuted minorities, and opportunists. This fame is local and racial: white America’s myth of itself. It does not, obviously, describe Native Americans...