Ararat: Poems

Louise Glück, the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, was an era-defining poet: innovative, brave, and wholly individual. Her work has left an indelible mark on the literature of our nation and of the world.

Ararat, Glück’s fifth collection of poetry, centers on the death of her father. Here she creates a ruthlessly probing family portrait and confronts the difficulties and intricacies of a daughter’s relationship to her parents. The result is a subtle and determined collection in which the poet interrogates both her own life and the whole world that emanates from it. “I was born to a vocation,” she writes, “to bear witness / to the great mysteries. / Now that I’ve seen both / birth and death, I know / to the dark nature these / are proofs, not / mysteries—”