Two phenomena keep the sour-mouthed, tight-lipped, sharp-tongued little poems of Miss Glück [in Firstborn] from being merely compulsive exercises in oral eroticism: the wretchedness is not hers alone, and the observation lavished upon it is of such high energy…. More remarkable, she has the imagination, alway rare but at twenty-four quite improbable, to dramatize the other, not merely to attest and oppose it, but to let alterity have its say in a voice of its own. She does more than invoke or inveigh against others…. She allows them to invade her, to inveigle her into being them, so that in many of these mini-monologues the poet is no more—and no less—than a medium; which is where she thrives, creating out of the unheard-of but instantly recognized detail and the altogether alien character that twist of idiom we call style…. The perils, of course, of abandoning...