Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
by Marilyn Hacker
from W. W. Norton & Company
Selected Poems: 1965-1990
by Marilyn Hacker
from W. W. Norton & Company
Marilyn Hacker's dark, complex poetic vision has a strange, often formal, beauty to it. Yet, when she writes in Living in the Moment: "I try to be a woman I could love./ I am probably wrong, asking/ you to stay . . ." one feels a very elemental tension between hope and fear, self-loathing and the need for love. It's a tangled inner life that Hacker is opening up for our inspection, and these are beautiful and brave poems.
She Says: Bilingual Edition
by Venus Khoury-Ghata
from Graywolf Press
Nettles: Poems
by Venus Khoury-Ghata
from Graywolf Press
the sun’s anger overturned the country
men who came from the wounded side of the river knocked
on our borders
I say men so as not to say locusts
—from “Nettles”
In Nettles, Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings her impulses for lyric poetry and for stark narrative together into four enchanting sequences. Each confronts the realities of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict with an imagination and history born from both the Arabic and French languages. Masterfully translated by
Marilyn Hacker, Nettles gives American readers this utterly original, indispensable poetry.
Going Back to the River
Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
by Marilyn Hacker
from W. W. Norton & Company
One of our strongest poets of conscience confronts the dangerous new century with intelligence, urbanity, and elegiac humor.
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.
Winter Numbers: Poems
by Marilyn Hacker
from W. W. Norton & Company
Marilyn Hacker's Winter Numbers is a meditation on death, a collection of painful poems in the wake of losing loved ones to AIDS and cancer. The numbers referred to here are the metronomic beats of passing time, the mile markers on life's journey, the months remaining in a doctor's grim prognosis. The only solace is in connection, as Hacker writes in Year's End: "Underneath the numbers, how lives are braided." Highly recommended for the mortal.
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.
Last News of Mr. Nobody
by Emmanuel Moses
from Handsel Books
The poems in this first English language collection by Emmanuel Moses draw their immediacy from the author's experiences in childhood, one that began in Paris and ended in Jerusalem, where he emigrated with his family in 1969. His poems trace the "gray hardness of pines," the pungent scent of sea water, mud underfoot on a forest path. They offer us incidents from everyday life alongside Biblical, mythological, and historical events. History, his own and that of the wider world, is alive for Emmanuel Moses, and the observations in his work are sharpened by an aching awareness of the passage of time.
The Hang-glider's Daughter : New Selected Poems
Love and War (Modern Poetry in Translation, Third Series)
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