Blue Dwarf
by Karl Gluck

“This book illuminates an archetypal struggle whose stakes are nothing less than life and death: the ceaseless quest by any means possible to enter into a higher, more ecstatic realm of being than quotidian reality will accommodate. Yet glimpses and intuitions of a greater realm leave the figures in these poems all the more unable to subsist in the temporal world we inhabit. A dream-vision atop the Buddhist mountain of paradise culminates in the realization that ‘Immortality was killing me,’ while a moment of seeming ‘perfection’ immediately becomes a near-death experience from a drug overdose. This pattern, which turns up in foundational literature from Genesis and Paradise Lost to the Icarus story, informs Blue Dwarf in myriad forms. This is the work of a poete maudit, embarked on a quest that cannot end in the type of triumph he aspires to. Yet this book illuminates the plight of all of us who wonder, with Hamlet, ‘What should such creatures as I do, crawling between earth and heaven.’ Along the way Gluck gives us dream-like visionary moments like the following: ‘Towards dawn I swim like a whale / floating through white clouds / in a sky of quartz that stretches / to the bottom of the ocean ... / over Spanish ruins / I watch the birth of whales.’”

—Andrew Kaufman, author of Both Sides of the Niger and the forthcoming The Rwanda Poems

“Karl Gluck’s Blue Dwarf is a study in dichotomies. In matter-of fact, mostly uncomplicated but subtly sophisticated straight forward language, Gluck’s world is one in which disparities and dissimilar elements quietly coexist—a world in which life accommodates itself. ‘Immortality was killing me,’ the poet writes. In another poem, this curious conceit: ‘I am very small inside / and do not think / I could walk on water.’ Then, without missing a beat: ‘or walk up to you in a bar / to ask you to dance.’ Characterized by an underlying decency, Gluck looks the world in the eye, even as others might feel compelled to look away. At the end of ‘Protests’ Gluck describes a monk self-immolating: ‘Just before his eyes grow black, / the flames turn as yellow as the skin / of the only girl he ever made love to, / and the fire stings, / like the abbot’s cane the day after.’ In Gluck’s world, life is unimaginable but manageable.”

—Allen Brafman, author of Everywhere I Look I Am Never There

Read excerpts from Blue Dwarf

Read a tribute to the late Karl Gluck by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson