2023
First Published
4.31
Average Rating
138
Number of Pages
A formally brilliant and powerful volume from “one of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today” (Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times ). 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.
Avg Rating
4.31
Number of Ratings
26
5 STARS
50%
4 STARS
35%
3 STARS
12%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Marilyn Hacker
Author · 19 books
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English. Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.
