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Rita Dove's Reading List

The former poet laureate Rita Dove, whose new collection is “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” loves the Icelandic saga “Grettir the Strong”: “Bleak, modernist stuff! And yet revisiting that litany of betrayals and cruelties never fails to stir my spirits.”

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By the Book: Rita Dove (2021)

NYT By the Book column (2021-08-06).

Source: www.nytimes.com

The Changing Light at Sandover

James Merrill · Buy on Amazon

"James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover is a modern-day Inferno that delights me more each time I return."

Cover of Decameron

Giovanni Boccaccio · Buy on Amazon

"Boccaccio's Decameron — another welcome exercise in pandemic reading."

Grettir the Strong

Unknown · Buy on Amazon

"Bleak, modernist stuff! And yet revisiting that litany of betrayals and cruelties never fails to stir my spirits."

Dante Alighieri · Buy on Amazon

"I reread during our current pandemic."

Melvin Tolson · Buy on Amazon

"Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery is an outrageously erudite and madcap fugue; each time I read it, I hear something new."

Cover of Telephone

Percival Everett · 2020 · Buy on Amazon

"Who can resist a novel with three different endings?"

Barbara Hamby · Buy on Amazon

"The capacious odes in Barbara Hamby's Holoholo are waiting."

A Treasury of Great Poems: English and American

Louis Untermeyer · Buy on Amazon

"I used more like an encyclopedia than a sacred text."

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