Faithful and Virtuous Night

The collection alternates between traditional poems and paragraph-long prose poems,^[1] marking the first inclusion of prose poems in a book by Glück.^[2]

Kathryn Davis, a friend of Glück's, read the collection's poems as they were written.^[3] She suggested Glück compose and include its prose poems. Glück drew inspiration from the short works of Franz Kafka while writing the collection.

In Boston Review, Craig Morgan Teicher wrote that the collection "[...] may be Glück’s strangest work yet, the hardest to describe or put in line with the others."^[4] Writing for NPR, Annalisa Quinn both praised and criticized the collection's abstruseness, referring to the prose poems as "blandly koanic" while also writing that some of the "[...] poems' incompleteness and inscrutability are suggestive rather than prohibitive."^[5]

Glück received the National Book Award for Poetry for the collection.^[6] It was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.^[7]