Ararat

A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck's sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father's hollow life and her mother's inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter's belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-strong, deeply felt lyrics are steeled by love and understanding.

Publishers Weekly

A ruthlessly probing family portrait in verse, Gluck's sixth poetry collection confronts, with devastating irony, her father's hollow life and her mother's inability to express emotion. This might seem like a daughter's belated rebellion, except that these fierce, rock-strong, deeply felt lyrics are steeled by love and understanding. The stuff of private pyschodrama is here: a withdrawn, too-obedient child's self-denial engendered by a sibling rivalry; the shattering death of an infant sister; learning to forgive her parents, to love her son. Gluck (whose last book, The Triumph of Achilles , won a National Book Critics Circle Award) transforms these domestic materials into an act of naked self-confrontation in heartrendingly beautiful, uncompromising poems. (Apr.)

Louise GlÜck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris in 1993. The author of eight books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She was named the next U.S. poet laureate in August 2003. Her most recent book is The Seven Ages. Louise GlÜck teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.