Marilyn Hacker

This critically acclaimed sonnet sequence is the passionately intense story of a love affair between two women, from the electricity of their first acquaintance to the experience of their parting.

Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In her seventh volume Marilyn Hacker confronts life and death at the end of our genocidal century, making another extraordinary contribution to the feminist and lesbian canon.

Winter Numbers: Poems

Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker's generous selections in A Stranger's Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp. In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafes, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations, and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype--perhaps with gunfire in the background. These poems course through sonnets and ghazals, through sapphics and syllabics, through every historic-organic pattern, from renga to rubaiyat to Hayden Carruth's "paragraph." Each is also an implicit conversation with the poets who came before, or who are writing as we read. A Stranger's Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world--far off or up close as the morning's first cup of tea.

A Stranger's Mirror

[Poetry]

Taking Notice

Separations

A congeries of verse forms charts and specifies personal, social, literary, geographical, and other separations that characterize the discordant dissatisfactions, agonizing losses, and desperate memories of our time.

Seperations

Uses whimsical, passionate language and both established and invented forms in a series of poems that focus on contemporary lives.

Poems

Names

Poems from five previous collections deal with feminism, politics, and human sexuality

Selected Poems, 1965-1990

Karthika Naïr

"Celebrated poets Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr compose a collaborative poem marking a year of friendship through stillness and grief"--

A Renga

A Different Distance

Hédi Kaddour

Hédi Kaddour's poetry arises from observation, from situations both ordinary and emblematic--of contemporary life, of human stubbornness, human invention, or human cruelty. With Treason, the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents an English-speaking audience with the first selected volume of his work. The poetries of several languages and literary traditions are lively and constant presences in the work of Hédi Kaddour, a Parisian as well as a Germanist and an Arabist. A walker's, a watcher's, and a listener's poems, his sonnet-shaped vignettes often include a line or two of dialogue that turns his observations and each poem itself into a kind of miniature theater piece. Favoring compact, classical models over long verse forms, Kaddour questions the structures of syntax and the limits of poetic form, combining elements of both international modernism and postmodernism with great sophistication. Capturing Kaddour's full range of diction, as well as his speed, momentum, and tone, Marilyn Hacker's translations brilliantly bring these poems alive.

Treason

Poems deal with mortality, AIDS, cancer, aging, social indifference, and human relations

Winter Numbers

Discusses Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, June Jordan, among others.

Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1987-2009

Unauthorized Voices

A ninth anthology of poetry by a winner of the National Book Award, Lenore Marshall Prize, and Poets' Prize celebrates the diverse passages of life, along with the community of friends, the courage of those living with terminal illness, and the mysteries of life and death. Reprint.

Squares and Courtyards

A landmark collection from a poet revered by the mainstream and lesbian feminists alike.

New and Selected Poems

The Hang-glider's Daughter

Guy Goffette

Letter to the unknown woman across the street, I Curtains, blinds, draperies, shades, no, nothing Madame, to conceal from your Cyclops’ eye in the shadows from which it spies on me this long pale body, false corpse tired out with debauchery, which is swooning too before your balcony, with your drying stockings and scanties of a nun at bay— poisonous flowers for a lonely man whom death panics, draws erect, demarrows in the night, riveted to your white thighs. Readers who denounce most contemporary French poetry as self-referential experimentation, word games, exercises in deconstruction, or other kinds of incomprehensible writing disconnected from everyday life—brace yourselves for a revelation. Erotic and urbane, distinguished by formal skill yet marked by the subtlest shades of feeling, Guy Goffette’s unabashedly lyrical poems pay homage to both Verlaine and Rimbaud, whom he counts as his important forbears, with echoes of Auden and Pound, Pavese and Borges. In Charlestown Blues, poet and translator Marilyn Hacker has chosen a tightly thematic selection of poems, all centering around the notion of “blue”—the color and the emotion, as well as that quintessentially American style of musical performance. Hacker’s crystalline and musical English renderings will show Anglophones why Goffette is considered one of the most important poets writing in French today.

Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition

Charlestown Blues

Gathering 25 years work by one of America's most elegant and pertinent poets, this title contains work from eight books, including an excerpt from the erotic verse novel 'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons', and a work written in the shadow of hegemonic empire.

Essays on Departure

One of our strongest poets of conscience confronts the dangerous new century with intelligence, urbanity, and elegiac humor.

Poems 1999-2002

Desesperanto

It can be hard to share your pain with others when the words for such raw emotions seem impossible to express. When you're deep into the blues, and your world feels dark, find a quiet place, open the pages of this beautiful book, and let the healing power of poetry pour into your soul. What you will discover in this wonderful collection are 100 poems that will take your blues away. They have been chosen with care and thought from the abundant resources of American and international writing. Favorite poets of the past such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens stand alongside the newer voices of Robert Bly, Louise Glück, W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Galway Kinnell, Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Marilyn Hacker, Dorianne Laux, James Wright, and others. Though they all speak with different voices, these poets find their own, miraculous words to expose pain and through this exposure, heal it.

Poetry to Heal Your Blues

A new volume of fluidly feminist verse by the author of Presentation Piece who continues to display a command of poetic technique and structure as well as a richly ripening vision

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019 This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker's engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman's call for 'an internationality of languages'.

Marilyn Hacker

Books

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