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New and selected sonnets from a treasured poet who “insists upon the rawness of experience and the metamorphosis of form with equal fervor and makes them both speak with the same voice” (W. S. Merwin). Over the course of her celebrated fifty-year career, Marilyn Hacker has continuously proven to be a timely, fearless, and lauded poet highly skilled in a wide variety of forms—most famously, the sonnet.
Transitions is her first volume consisting entirely of the beloved form.
Hacker is a poet of quiet mastery. In her hands, the sonnet, despite the stricture of meter and rhyme, blooms into a living, breathing thing, one that’s contemporary, confessional, and subversive. Sentences effortlessly fall into formal constraint, and words that evoke the pleasure of everyday language become Petrarchan rhymes. As Jan Heller Levi wrote, “No one writes about lust and lunch like Marilyn Hacker. And certainly no one has done more to demonstrate that form has nothing to do with formula.”
From her early sonnets to those written decades later, this book offers a portrait of the seasons of an extraordinary life, a life lived between New York, Paris, and Beirut as an activist, a polyglot, and a queer woman. We see Hacker’s speaker grappling with young motherhood, the dissolution of her heterosexual marriage, middle age, relationships with women, chronic illness, care received from her adult child, and her twilight years, all while confronting geopolitical tension and global tragedies, from the AIDS epidemic to the war in Gaza.
Transitions is a remarkable celebration of a life lived in verse. Intelligent, contemplative, and justice-driven, this profound collection cements Marilyn Hacker’s reputation of one of the indispensable poets of our time.
About the author
Marilyn Hacker is the author of twenty-one books of poems and twenty-two collections of poetry in translation from the French. Over the course of her fifty-year career, she has received numerous honors, including the National Book Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Argana International Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, editor of
The Kenyon Review, and editor of the French literary journal
Siècle 21. She lives between Paris and New York.
