Calligraphies: Poems - Hardcover

by Marilyn Hacker (Author)

Moving from Paris to Beirut and back, Calligraphies is a tribute to exiles and refugees, the known and unknown, dead and living, from the American poet Marie Ponsot to the Syrian pasionaria Fadwa Suleiman. Award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker finds resistance, wit, potential, and gleaming connection in everyday moments--a lunch of "standing near the fridge with / labneh, two verbs, and a spoon"--as a counterweight to the precarity of existence.

With signature passion and agility, Hacker draws from French, Arabic, and English to probe the role of language in identity and revolution. Amid conversations in smoky cafes, personal mourning, and political turmoil, she traces the lines between exiles and expats, immigrants and refugees. A series of "Montpeyroux Sonnets" bookends the volume, cataloguing months in 2021 and 2022 in which the poet observes a village "in pandemic mode" and reflects on her own aging.

In a variety of tones and formal registers, from vivid crowns of sonnets to insistent ghazals to elegiac pantoums and riffs on the renga, Calligraphies explores a world opened up by language.

Back Jacket

Praise for Marilyn Hacker

"Like all great poets, [Marilyn Hacker] transcends the very material she collects and alters. Her true quest is for language that will realize the stranger, and, in doing so, unify the self."
--Grace Schulman, Kenyon Review

"[Marilyn] Hacker is a swashbuckling wielder of poetry's most challenging forms (she writes a ghazal with more fluency than most poets can manage a haiku)."
--David Orr, New York Times Book Review

"A poet who connects the dots between the body and the body politic, [Marilyn Hacker] is also that rarest of poetic animals, one who writes in meter and rhyme with a radical agenda.... [She] channel[s] a fierce energy into a signature tone that is at once casual, intense, and brimming with wordplay."
--Alicia Ostriker, Women's Review

"[Marilyn] Hacker is, to use a trite term, a major poet. More than that she is exciting and true."
--George Szirtes

"A member of a feminist-poetry sisterhood, [Marilyn] Hacker is allied with Carolyn Forché as she bears witness; with Adrienne Rich as she shatters silences; and with Audre Lorde as she shows us the ravages of illness and the courage to confront it."
--Ann van Buren, The Rumpus

"Marilyn Hacker is one of our greatest poets, according to every critical sense by which we measure a poet's greatness."
--Lawrence Joseph