I decided to read Averno after Victoria Lee referenced Glück's poem "The Night Migrations" in A Lesson in Vengeance, the lesbian dark academia novel of my dreams. Then I remembered that I also read a Glück book, Meadowlands, during October of 2020, and read a poem of hers in a workshop I took circa October 2019, so it's possible that Glück is just my October poet now. And I'm not upset about it.

Averno is beautiful in a way that makes a kind of soul-sense even if I wasn't always sure that I was getting the brain-sense of all of the pieces. Glück melds mythology and autobiography and loss and loneliness in ways that feel familiar to me and my own poetic preoccupations, and I left this book thinking that I really need to buy a copy, because I'm going to want to come back to it again. It slots in with Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts on the list of books I've read over the past couple of years that feel Very Important to me in ways that haven't fully bloomed yet, but that I think will do so.