12. Cool

The cool thing about poetry — and yes, there’s a cool thing about poetry, so you’d better un-arch that eyebrow — is that you can be reading a poem and not get it and not get it, and then suddenly you really, truly get it and the moment of recognition is so startling it’s like a truck has rushed past your house and made all the windows rattle.

Louise Glück is my favorite non-dead poet. She’s spent 50 years obsessed with our differing capacities for love and joy, and our grasping, tentative stabs at understanding life, never mind death.

/ Jeff Giles, Entertainment Weekly, über Louise Glück: Poems 1962-2012