Faithful and Virtuous Night
{{short description|2014 poetry collection by Louise Glück}}
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| name = Faithful and Virtuous Night
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| image = File:Faithful and Virtuous Night.jpg
| caption = First edition
| author = Louise Glück
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| genre = Poetry
| publisher = Farrar, Straus and Giroux
| release_date = 2014
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Faithful and Virtuous Night is a poetry collection by Louise Glück, published in 2014.
Composition and contents
The collection alternates between traditional poems and paragraph-long prose poems,{{cite news |last1=Rumens |first1=Carol |title=Poem of the week: A Work of Fiction by Louise Glück |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/25/poem-of-the-week-a-work-of-fiction-louise-gluck-carol-rumens1 |accessdate=10 October 2020 |work=The Guardian |date=25 August 2014}} marking the first inclusion of prose poems in a book by Glück.{{cite news |last1=Gonzalez |first1=Elisa |title=An Interview with Louise Glück |url=https://www.washingtonsquarereview.com/louise-gluck |accessdate=10 October 2020 |publisher=Washington Square Review |date=Spring 2015}}
Kathryn Davis, a friend of Glück's, read the collection's poems as they were written.{{cite news |last1=Giraldi |first1=William |title=Internal Tapestries: A Q&A With Louise Glück |url=https://www.pw.org/content/internal_tapestries |accessdate=10 October 2020 |publisher=Poet's & Writers |date=20 November 2014}} She suggested Glück compose and include its prose poems. Glück drew inspiration from the short works of Franz Kafka while writing the collection.
Reception
In Boston Review, Craig Morgan Teicher wrote that the collection "[...] may be Glück’s strangest work yet, the hardest to describe or put in line with the others."{{cite news |last1=Death Mask |title=Death Mask |url=http://bostonreview.net/poetry/craig-teicher-louise-gluck-faithful-virtuous-night-death-mask |accessdate=10 October 2020 |work=Boston Review |publisher=Boston Review |date=8 January 2015 |language=en}} Writing for NPR, Annalisa Quinn both praise and criticized the collection's abstruseness, referring to the prose poems as "blandly koanic" while also writing that some of the "[...] poems' incompleteness and inscrutability are suggestive rather than prohibitive."{{cite news |last1=Quinn |first1=Annalisa |title=The Ecstatic Blankness Of Poet Louise Glück |url=https://www.npr.org/2014/09/11/343144589/the-ecstatic-blankness-of-poet-louise-gl-ck |accessdate=10 October 2020 |work=NPR.org |publisher=NPR |date=11 September 2014 |language=en}}
=Honors and awards=
Glück received the National Book Award for Poetry for the collection.{{cite news |title='Redeployment,' 'Age Of Ambition' Win National Book Awards |url=https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/11/19/365288220/the-2014-national-book-awards |accessdate=10 October 2020 |work=NPR.org |publisher=NPR |date=19 November 2014 |language=en}} It was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.{{cite news |last1=Flood |first1=Alison |title=TS Eliot prize shortlist joins conflict and reconciliation in the Middle East |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/23/ts-eliot-prize-shortlist-2014-padel-powers |accessdate=10 October 2020 |work=The Guardian |date=23 October 2014 |language=en}}