Walt Hunter

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
“Frankie met Lucia in that summer …” If there’s a better beginning for that greatest of all genres—the summer romance—I don’t know what it would be. Add in an ice-cream shack, a beach, a thunderstorm, and some distracted parents—all of the irresistible ingredients are here in Ruby Opalka’s “Spit,” a short story published in The Atlantic this week.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The 24-year-old Diné poet Kinsale Drake’s “Making a Monument Valley,” which appears in The Atlantic’s September issue, maps the Indigenous history of Los Angeles with pulsing, kinetic language.

As editors who review poetry for The Atlantic, we read a lot of poems. Each week, there are new PDFs in our inboxes; our desks are covered with chaotic piles of books we’ve yet to crack open, and our shelves are already packed with old favorites. We’re also frequently asked, “What poetry should I read?” The question couldn’t be more reasonable, but embarrassingly, it tends to make our minds go blank.

Waking, you’re delighted: “Oh!” A
long, loud cry. But the dog’s not there.
You were dreaming. I woke looking
at the hands you said were beautiful.
All this dead-end summer, the hours
at the end of the day debriding hope,
the hours in the morning asking fear
to stay beside us. These are the years
beyond perfection, the days the coneflowers
rock from side to side like particles
suspended in the drying early Front Range air.

One of the most striking qualities about the poetry of Louise Glück, who on Thursday won the Nobel Prize in Literature, is the way it returns again and again to the start of things—a story, a myth, a day, a marriage, a childhood. The question How do we begin anew? runs throughout the American poet’s work, from Firstborn (1968) to her most recent collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014).