A sonnet sequence of 167 poems tells the passionate story of a love affair between two women, from the erotic electricity of their first acquaintance to the tough-minded tranquility of their breakup

Longlisted for the National Book Award A selection of poems that addresses the quotidian and the global, from one of our most essential poets. 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 cafés, 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.

The wonder of Marilyn Hacker's poems...is that she insists upon the rawness of experience and the metamorphosis of form with equal fervor and makes them both speak with the same voice. The result, again and again, is a poem of intense intimacy, beauty and authority."—W. S. Merwin

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'.

“[Hacker] powerfully brings her formal mastery and her political sensibility together.”— American Poet In Names , Marilyn Hacker juxtaposes glimpses of contemporary lives with dialogues undertaken in signal poetic voices. Using her signature wit, passion, and mastery of received and invented forms, she convinces us to believe in a world made possible by language—prescient, playful, polyglot, and often breathtaking. from “Ghazal: The Beloved”: Lines that grapple doubt, written because of the beloved: when grief subsides, what survives the loss of the beloved? Your every declaration is suspect. That was, at least, the departing gloss of the beloved. Were you merely a servant of the state or (now you give the coin a toss) of the beloved? How pure you were, resistant in an orchard. Peace with justice: the cause of the beloved.

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.

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

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir , meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto , then, is a universal language of despair -despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

Praise for Marilyn Hacker: "How piercing the duet we're offered between Marilyn Hacker and the reality principle. Reality saying, it’s impossible, something's always sacrificed: you can't be so merry and so raw; so learned and earthy; so gut-wrenching, so danceable at once. Can you? To which, steadily, the voice of Marilyn Hacker: Yes. Evidently; Evidently so." ---Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Epistemology of the Closet and Touching Feeling "Hacker is one of our best singers---by turns elegiac and fierce, sweet and witty. With each new collection her voice grows richer, more resonant, sorrowing and lovely." ---Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents "Marilyn Hacker joins a marvelous facility with poetic forms to a shockingly intense sensuality. Not unlike Baudelaire, you might say, and indeed like him, she shares a taste for excess, drink, Paris, women, crowds. 'Enivrez-vous!' Baudelaire ordered his readers, and Marilyn Hacker has taken his advice seriously." ---Edmund White, author of Hotel de Dream, City Boy , and Le Flâneur "Everything is thrilling and true, fast and witty, deep and wise; her vitality is the pulse of life itself." ---Derek Mahon, author of Harbour Lights and An Autumn Wind A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. For over twenty years, award-winning poet, translator, and editor Marilyn Hacker has been writing incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, poets of color, and any poets whose work she judged worthy of more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public. Unauthorized Voices is Hacker’s first collection of critical prose, bringing together her essays on American, British, Irish, and French poets. It includes pieces on Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Harrison, Marilyn Nelson, and June Jordan; on French and Francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Guy Goffette; on poetry and politics; and on the contemporary sonnet, all affirming Hacker as a lively, unabashedly opinionated American critical voice. Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names and Essays on Departure , and of ten collections of poetry translated from the French, including Marie Étienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen , recipient of the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has been the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the National Book Award for her own poetry and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Review After Assumption Against Silence Alba Near Impruneta April Interval Celles Country & Western Country & Western 2 Cultural Exchanges Days Of 1944: Three Friends Dear Jool, I Miss You In Saint-saturnin Dinner With Elizabeth Elevens For Jean Migrenne For L. J., Leaving And Coming Back From Orient Point Going Away From The River Going Back To The River La Bougeotte Languedocienne The Last April Interval Late August Late August Letter Le Travail Rajeunit Les Serpillieres Letter From Goose Creek: April Literary Initiation C. 1960 Market Day Nights Of 1962: The River Merchant's Wife Nights Of 1964-1966: The Old Reliable Riposte Saturday Night Bile Self Separate Lives Then Torch Two Cities -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® Product Description Feminist verse displays a command of poetic technique and structure as well as a richly ripening vision