Faithful and Virtuous Night in Bloomington, MN

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry
A luminous, seductive new collection from the "fearless" (
The New York Times
) Pulitzer Prize–winning poet
Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her
Poems 1962–2012
was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of
. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation.
Faithful and Virtuous Night
is no exception.
You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball."
Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.