Calligraphies
Poems
Published on 1. November 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
144 pages
978-1-324-08645-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
"A book of morally infused witness for our troubled times." -- Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity "[Marilyn] Hacker examines love, war, resistance, literature, memories, and aging.... [A] poetic journey not to be missed." -- Library Journal, starred review "These varied and powerful poems highlight the healing that resides in poetic collaboration and friendship across borders." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review "Marilyn 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 MapsMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 206 mm
Width: 137 mm
Thickness: 10 mm
Weight
118 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-324-08645-1 (9781324086451)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen volumes of poems. Her honors include the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She lives in Paris.