Marigold and Rose

Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962-2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Montpelier, Vermont.

"Luminous . . . [Marigold and Rose] shimmers with Glück's trademark poetic voice, weaving everyday magic into playpens and cribs." -TIME

"[Marigold and Rose] exists in a liminal zone between poetry and prose . . . Glück, in shrinking the world to the size of a pair of blankets inside cribs, manages to gently pack her narrative with feeling . . . It addresses, in larval and thus primal form, many of the concerns of Glück's poetry. As she wrote in a poem titled 'Nostos': 'We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.'" -Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Glück's emotional intelligence never surrenders to cosy consolation, yet the writing remains exquisitely beautiful . . . Marigold and Rose can be devoured in a single sitting, and that's probably the best way to enter its tonal world, which is strangely hypnotic, in part because the mood never swings to violent intensity, and in part because of the orderly rhythms of Glück's prose . . . [Marigold and Rose] brilliantly evokes the timelessness of early childhood, and indeed of babyhood, before a child has even adapted to her own circadian rhythms. There is that sense of suspension, of living without past or future, which is the superpower of infancy." -Fiona Sampson, The Guardian

"Alongside an exploration of the dichotomies that bind the girls together are meditations on many of Glück's familiar preoccupations: halves and wholes, familial inheritance, time's passage, the psychic power of words. The innocence of the girls' observations, bearing an infant clarity, pare many of the book's subjects down to a revealing frankness." -The New Yorker

"Stunningly imaginative, incisive, sly, and hilarious . . . Concentrating the depth, rigor, and complexity of her poems into a delectably renegade, mordant, and bravura prose performance, Glück tracks the love and rivalry between these little philosophers . . . Succinctly and provocatively illuminates the vagaries of human