A researcher spent 38 years asking whether his college classmates were happy. You don't have to have been in his class to learn something from the results.
Sound Check: W.S. Merwin’s Love of Foreign Language
A translator who puts his mark on poems—a bit too strongly.
The Knife—The Sharp Poetry of Louise Glück
IF LOUISE GLUCK had released a Collected Poems a dozen years ago, we would have known what to make of her. She was a walking dysphemism, a blade without a handle, a poet so intent on “unmasking … the ordinary to reveal the tragic,” as she put it, that any sign of kindness prompted bitter cynicism. “Mothers weep at their daughters’ weddings,/ everyone knows that, though/ for whose youth one cannot say,” she wrote in 1985. “My father liked/ to stand like this, to hold me/ so he couldn’t see me” (1990).