Robert Glück is an American poet, fiction writer, critic, editor, and one of the founding figures of New Narrative. His work brings autobiography, erotic experience, literary theory, memory, friendship, art, and historical imagination into forms that remain intensely self-aware about the act of telling.
Glück’s writing grew from the experimental literary culture of San Francisco in the late 1970s and 1980s. With Bruce Boone, he helped shape New Narrative, a movement that joined story, lyric intensity, criticism, sexuality, and self-reflexive prose. The result is a body of work in which intimate experience becomes a way of thinking about language, power, desire, and the responsibilities of narration.
New Narrative and San Francisco
New Narrative emerged in conversation with feminist writing, queer culture, Language poetry, and the literary communities of San Francisco. Glück and Boone developed a practice in which storytelling could remain emotionally direct while exposing its own methods, assumptions, and gaps.
The movement became a major influence on later hybrid writing. Writers associated with New Narrative include Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Kathy Acker, and others whose work moves across fiction, essay, memoir, criticism, and poetry. Readers interested in the movement’s relation to formally experimental verse can continue through Language poetry and the profile of Kevin Killian.
Margery Kempe
Margery Kempe, first published in 1994 and reissued by New York Review Books in 2020, is one of Glück’s central works. The novel places the medieval visionary Margery Kempe beside a contemporary story of desire, allowing devotional language, erotic obsession, historical distance, and autobiographical material to occupy the same structure.
The book turns historical writing into an intimate form of literary inquiry. Medieval spirituality and contemporary sexuality become mutually illuminating, while the narrator’s awareness of his own acts of invention keeps the historical material under constant pressure.
About Ed
About Ed, published by New York Review Books in 2023, develops Glück’s long engagement with memory, love, friendship, illness, and the AIDS crisis. The book centers on Ed Aulerich-Sugai, Glück’s former lover and later friend, whose dream notebooks became part of the work’s material.
The book moves through remembered scenes, recorded voices, dreams, art, domestic life, political history, grief, and the effort to preserve another person in language. Its hybrid form gives memory room to remain unstable and collaborative.
I, Boombox
Roof Books published I, Boombox in 2023. Glück describes the work as a modernist long poem built from misreadings, dream, memory, overheard language, and drifting recognition. The poem extends his prose practice into a sustained verse structure shaped by interruption and recurrence.
I, Boombox joins the history of the American long poem to New Narrative’s concern with unstable selfhood and self-conscious narration. Its movement through fragment, sound, image, and association gives the book a restless musical architecture.
Desire, memory, and literary form
Across Glück’s work, desire is both subject and method. Erotic attachment can organize memory, determine attention, distort chronology, and expose the narrator’s investments in the story being told. This makes intimacy structurally important as well as emotionally charged.
Memory behaves similarly. Glück often lets contradiction, uncertainty, fantasy, documentary trace, and retrospective knowledge remain active together. The resulting prose and poetry invite readers to watch a narrative assemble itself in real time.
Editing, teaching, and literary community
Glück has worked across several San Francisco literary institutions. He served as codirector of Small Press Traffic, worked as an associate editor at Lapis Press, and directed the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he is an emeritus professor.
His editorial and critical work extends the communal dimension of New Narrative. Essays collected in Communal Nude examine writing, sexuality, literary friendship, collaboration, and the social conditions in which experimental literature develops.
Robert Glück in American literature
Glück occupies an important place in American poetry and experimental prose through his role in New Narrative, his long engagement with queer literary culture, and his movement between poem, novel, memoir, essay, and criticism. His work shows how narrative can remain formally adventurous while carrying intense personal and historical material.
Readers following living writers across hybrid forms, contemporary literary movements, and cross-genre practice can continue through the guide to contemporary poets.
Where to read Robert Glück
The New York Review Books author page provides a current bibliography and routes into Margery Kempe, Jack the Modernist, and About Ed. Roof Books provides publication information and context for I, Boombox. The Poetry Foundation guide to New Narrative places Glück within the movement he helped establish.