Calligraphies

Reviews / Votes

"Hacker examines love, war, resistance, literature, memories, and aging, but what she does best is capture the everyday: the tastes and smells of food, coffee, and wine, and, most importantly, the clashes of languages and cultures... [T]hese poems breathe with life... {A] poetic journey not to be missed." -- Library Journal (starred review) "Formally ambitious and energetic... These varied and powerful poems highlight the healing that resides in poetic collaboration and friendship across borders." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Yet another astonishing and important book of poems by Marilyn Hacker, open and generous, ever-attentive, fiercely intelligent, a book of morally infused witness to our troubled times, a book of sensuousness, profoundly felt, a book of love. Hacker, in Calligraphies-as she has always done-does what great poets do, formally capture what it's emotionally like to be most alive." -- Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity "Calligraphies' etymology of 'beautiful writing' proves true and moves us into the future as Hacker's sly insight, salty candor, and masterful craft has done for nearly 50 years. Our sage femme of form and politics, her language from Paris, New York and Beirut, is always the cry from the street-and the heart-because Hacker is one of our great translators of the human experience." -- Jessica Greenbaum, author of Spilled and Gone "In Calligraphies, Marilyn Hacker further cements her position as one of our greatest contemporary masters of poetic form. Elegant and yet homespun, cosmopolitan yet grounded, Hacker's poems (in the shapes of sonnets, tankas, ghazals) document and sing the lives of exiles, her friends from Beirut to Paris and beyond. Thriving on what Edward Said called 'late style,' that period of an artist's practice where they face the end, Hacker has become a poet not only for her (and our) twilight age, but for the ages." -- Philip Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps