Louise Glück is ravishingly downbeat in this week's New Yorker. Her poem, Before The Storm, is unsettling and slightly panicked. It's a dark meditation, with only hints of brightness in the first and last lines. She has an ability to say something almost banal, and then turn it on it's head to be devastating: Yesterday a sheep escaped into the woods, / and not just any sheep—the ram, the whole future. / If we see him again, we’ll see his bones. Later in the poem, she renders the same sentiment more bluntly: Tomorrow the dawn won't come. Go read the whole thing. It's worth the pain.