Glück’s intensity repelled me when I first encountered her work, as a student ... Now that I’m older, have suffered more and realize my life is likely more than half over, it’s her seriousness, her coldness, that appeals. Some days, and in the dark intervals between days, it seems to me that Glück’s preoccupations are what poetry is for, that poems are confrontations with the void ... Glück has become a true poet of the void ... [Winter Recipes] is quite brief, only 15 poems, and gives an impression of exhaustion, as though language and material have been nearly depleted ... Here, as in her last book, the poems often feel like fables or strange little fictions, positing characters with unclear relation to the poet ... The book is full of echoes of her earlier work, its winds (the breath of the void) and silence.

The Nobel Prize–winning poet has been publishing for more than five decades, and much of that time has been spent analyzing despair, melancholy, and anguish ... The fact that she’s so defiantly unskilled at (and uninterested in) 'moving on' is part of what keeps us readers coming back, in hopes of learning how we might live with our own insoluble griefs ... You’ll find no triumphs in her poems, no half-baked consolations. And yet, severe as a lot of her writing is, there’s tenderness in the way her voice beckons us. Her poems invite us into the grand enterprise of human struggle—a not insignificant gesture ... Winter Recipes from the Collective, her first volume in seven years, shows how gifted she is at coaxing new resonances and colors out of a minimalistic vocabulary. The same stark images recur ... In her late career, she’s still crying out the same sad songs, but in a richer, mellower timbre ... Glück may despise the platitudes of self-help literature, but it’s clear in this book that she sees poetry as some form of service; in their own way, her words light a path for us.

... an exquisitely small collection—the way an atom that contains the world is small—that further solidifies Glück’s place as one of the eminent poets of our time ... This work exists in multi-temporality where beginnings and endings cross each other like a game of cat’s cradle ... This collection is a contemplation of loss and grief and as well as what may yet come. It provides a roadmap from which to unpack and reconfigure our lives as poets and philosophers have done for humankind since language was afforded us ... In this poetry—as in many Eastern notions of time and the universe—there’s less of a quest for answers than this notion of constant change that is also entwined with the concept of stillness. Being and observing—and at the same time observing the inner self—is the point. Indeed, one can imagine that the speaker could also be the concierge; both the guide and the one who is guided ... , Glück explores many such small and powerful moments, those that are building blocks of the most complex issues of life and philosophy. It’s in this quietude that we see what we must hoard for the winter of our lives: the sights, sounds, loves, memories that we need to get us through to the next season whatever and whenever that may be.

The poems are elegiac, brooding and death-obsessed, haunted by intimations of mortality, by ghosts facing backward with regret and forward with trepidation. It is an end-of-life book, where the life in question could be anyone’s: the poet’s, the reader’s, the planet’s ... its poems, spoken in hushed and hesitant tones, are delicate and spare. One’s impression is of fragility, of vulnerability ... Every ending is a new beginning, as the consoling cliche goes; but in this book, every mention of new beginnings is immediately qualified and drained of any potential for hope ... Though Winter Recipes from the Collective is a challenging read, it is refreshing in its willingness to confront the uncertainties and anxieties ignited by our current predicament, in which predictions of our collective future alternate between the terrifying and the inscrutable ... It is a grim joy, yes, but one that feels true to its moment, one that we need, and one that readers of this bleakly elegant collection will find themselves savoring.

Most of the poems in this new collection mull over emotional failures—not just the lack of desire or passion, but of basic human connections ... The struggle to connect but also to create, to tell a fable or an enlightening story, baffles the personae of these poems. This might seem like a negative poetics, but it enables the poet to link the creative self with the feeling self in a way that sidesteps problems of personality and to delve deeply into the muddle of perceptions and sensations from which poetry emerges ... Aside from the complex emotional tenor of these poems, what makes them so readable is the narration—image succeeding image in a convincing flow of perception—and Glück’s agile free verse. It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of writing free verse. These poems offer a succession of short lines, long and short lines mingled, long line succeeding long line, unfolding with the inevitability that characterizes all good verse, metrical or free ... Casual yet perfect, conversational yet inevitable, the verse fully formed yet informal, Glück at her best—and she often is at her best—is a master of lyric narrative. Although brief, this new collection offers some of her best work ... Everyone seriously interested in poetry will be reading these for years to come.

Glück’s work builds on an inquiring sense of wonder over our human experience and fortitude. If not for her tender, sometimes funny lines, one might mistake her for a pessimist ... The Nobel committee praised the 'austere beauty' of Glück’s poems; this marvelous collection adds warmth and wit.

Quiet but powerful ... Glück considers a primary human loneliness in humane, reflective poems that are deeply engaged with the idea of being alone with oneself ... With this magnificent collection, a great poet delivers a treatise on how to live and die.