"Essays on Departure" is a gathering of 25 years' work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English, work from eight books, including a generous excerpt from the electrically erotic verse novel "Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons", and new work written in the shadow of hegemonic empire. Often unabashedly narrative, at once witty and elegiac, this is a poetry in open dialogue with its sources, as close at hand or as surprising as Donne , Akhmatova, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser, Joseph Roth or the Algerian Kateb Yacine. In the past decade, this exchange has been informed by Hacker's widely-published translations of contemporary French poets, and for the first time a selection of this work is included with her own poems. Marilyn Hacker's poetry has been - and will be - acclaimed for its keen observations of the poet's two cities, New York and Paris, its fusion of precise form and demotic language, its music, its memory, its confrontations with mortality and its stubborn delectation of life.

This series publishes translations, original poems, reviews and short essays that address such characteristic signs of our times as exile, the movement of peoples, the search for asylum, and the speaking of languages outside their native home.

A selection of poems that addresses the quotidian and the global, from one of our most essential poets. Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker's generous selections in A Stranger's Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp. In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafes, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype-perhaps with gunfire in the background. These poems course through sonnets and ghazals, through sapphics and syllabics, through every historic-organic pattern, from renga to rubaiyat to Hayden Carruth's "paragraph". Each is also an implicit conversation with the poets who came before, or who are writing as we read. A Stranger's Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world-far off or up close as the morning's first cup of tea.

Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker's generous selections in A Stranger's Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp. In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafes, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype-perhaps with gunfire in the background. These poems course through sonnets and ghazals, through sapphics and syllabics, through every historic-organic pattern, from renga to rubaiyat to Hayden Carruth's "paragraph". Each is also an implicit conversation with the poets who came before, or who are writing as we read. A Stranger's Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world-far off or up close as the morning's first cup of tea.

Marie Etienne's poetry is inspired by the synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane--the quotidian transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. Through a profound and complex reinterpretation of the sonnet form, the book reflects, as in a mosaic of shattered mirrors, many of the writer's ongoing preoccupations: the relationship of East and West; an eroticism at once physical and cerebral; the interaction of poetry and prose; the strange blending of the everyday and the foreign, in which the most "exotic" journeys become ordinary and the most ordinary displacements partake of the strange. "King of a Hundred Horsemen"--in a brilliant translation by Marilyn Hacker that Robert Hass selected for the National Poetry Series's first Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007--is an elegant, deeply affecting work from a master poet.

A Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Special Commendation. Chosen as a TLS Book of the Year 2019. This generous volume collects new work by one of the most elegant and pertinent poets working in English. Hacker writes pantoums, sonnets, canzones, ghazals and tanka; she is witty, angry, traditional, experimental. Her poetry is in open dialogue with its sources, which include W. H. Auden, Hayden Carruth, Adrienne Rich, and latterly a host of contemporary French, Francophone and Arab poets. Hacker's engagement with Arabic, almost a second language in Paris, where she lives, has led to her exchanges and engagement with Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees in France, whose own stories and memories deepen and broaden her already polyglot oeuvre. Her poetry has been celebrated for its fusion of precise form and demotic language; with this, her latest volume, Hacker ranges further, answering Whitman's call for `an internationality of languages'.

"Marilyn Hacker is truly one of this country's greatest translators; her work is distinguished by technical subtlety, deep knowledge of the French language, and the sensibility of a first-class poet. Her translation of Emmanuel Moses' He and I introduces a vital, ambitious new poet to American readers. By turns violent and witty, melancholy and thoughtful, He and I deserves a wide readership and high praise."
--Kevin Prufer

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle AwardIn 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.

Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, who lives in France and has won many of France's major literary prizes, blends French surrealism with Arabic poetry's communal narrative mode in three stunning poetic sequences. Here brilliantly translated from the French by poet Marilyn Hacker, the English-speaking reader has rare insight into another world, another dimension.

Poetry in a time of upheaval Equal parts dramatic and symphonic, the poetry of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen provides acute insight into the European consciousness of the first half of the twentieth century. With energetic innovation and imaginative depth, Dadelsen extols the somber beauty of his Alsatian homeland, grapples with the elusiveness of meaning, and decries religion's futile attempts to speak to a continent ravaged by fascism and war. His is an acerbic and humane assessment of French and European identity that draws on the past and imagines the future, while remaining firmly rooted in the present. In these poems, Dadelsen modulates himself in dramatic monologue, exploring a mosaic of voices to form a composite portrait of the postwar landscape. Inhabiting such characters as King Solomon, Johann Sebastian Bach, provincial French women, and a Hungarian resistant in the 1956 uprising, the poems in this new bilingual collection offer an inside look at the shifting cultural topography of midcentury Europe, forged in the war that reshaped our understanding of the human condition.

Hedi Kaddour's poetry arises from observation, from situations both ordinary and emblematic-of contemporary life, of human stubbornness, human invention, or human cruelty. With Treason, the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents an English-speaking audience with the first selected volume of his work. The poetries of several languages and literary traditions are lively and constant presences in the work of Hedi Kaddour, a Parisian as well as a Germanist and an Arabist. A walker's, a watcher's, and a listener's poems, his sonnet-shaped vignettes often include a line or two of dialogue that turns his observations and each poem itself into a kind of miniature theater piece. Favoring compact, classical models over long verse forms, Kaddour questions the structures of syntax and the limits of poetic form, combining elements of both international modernism and postmodernism with great sophistication. Capturing Kaddour's full range of diction, as well as his speed, momentum, and tone, Marilyn Hacker's translations brilliantly bring these poems alive.

Hedi Kaddour's poetry arises from observation, from situations both ordinary and emblematic--of contemporary life, of human stubbornness, human invention, or human cruelty. With "Treason," the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents an English-speaking audience with the first selected volume of his work.

The poetries of several languages and literary traditions are lively and constant presences in the work of Hedi Kaddour, a Parisian as well as a Germanist and an Arabist. A walker's, a watcher's, and a listener's poems, his sonnet-shaped vignettes often include a line or two of dialogue that turns his observations and each poem itself into a kind of miniature theater piece. Favoring compact, classical models over long verse forms, Kaddour questions the structures of syntax and the limits of poetic form, combining elements of both international modernism and postmodernism with great sophistication.

Capturing Kaddour's full range of diction, as well as his speed, momentum, and tone, Marilyn Hacker's translations brilliantly bring these poems alive.

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."

The wonder of Marilyn Hacker's poems...is that she insists upon the rawness of experience and the metamorphosis of form with equal fervor and makes them both speak with the same voice. The result, again and again, is a poem of intense intimacy, beauty and authority." W. S. Merwin"

Moving back and forth with the rhythm of the writer s life, from Paris to New York, from the 1990s to the 1940s, Squares and Courtyards reminds us that, to take action, it is necessary to take notice."

This critically acclaimed sonnet sequence is the passionately intense story of a love affair between two women, from the electricity of their first acquaintance to the experience of their parting.

"Elegant and versatile in the strictest forms, [Hacker] is inventive and exuberant in content. She's colloquial, lyrical, uncouth, old-fashioned, and fun. (How many books of poems are fun?) . . . No one sings quite like this. A capella, she's a whole choir."—New York Times Book Review

Stunning new work by this inimitable French master

Marilyn Hacker's poems have been praised for their technical virtuosity, forthright feminism, political acuity, and unabashed eroticism. Included are selections from Hacker's first book, Presentation Piece (1974), the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award Winner; Separations (1976); Taking Notice (1980), which was claimed as an integral part of the burgeoning feminist and lesbian canon; Assumptions (1985), which explored the conundrums of gender, race, and identity in contemporary life; and Going Back to the River (1990), which received a Lambda Literary Award.