BiblioVault - Books about Hacker, Marilyn

Charlestown Blues

Selected Poems, a Bilingual Edition

Guy Goffette

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Letter to the unknown woman across the street, I
Curtains, blinds, draperies, shades, no, nothing
Madame, to conceal from your Cyclops’ eye
in the shadows from which it spies on me
this long pale body, false corpse tired out
with debauchery, which is swooning too
before your balcony, with your drying
stockings and scanties of a nun at bay—
poisonous flowers for a lonely man
whom death panics, draws erect, demarrows
in the night, riveted to your white thighs.

Readers who denounce most contemporary French poetry as self-referential experimentation, word games, exercises in deconstruction, or other kinds of incomprehensible writing disconnected from everyday life—brace yourselves for a revelation. Erotic and urbane, distinguished by formal skill yet marked by the subtlest shades of feeling, Guy Goffette’s unabashedly lyrical poems pay homage to both Verlaine and Rimbaud, whom he counts as his important forbears, with echoes of Auden and Pound, Pavese and Borges.

In Charlestown Blues, poet and translator Marilyn Hacker has chosen a tightly thematic selection of poems, all centering around the notion of “blue”—the color and the emotion, as well as that quintessentially American style of musical performance. Hacker’s crystalline and musical English renderings will show Anglophones why Goffette is considered one of the most important poets writing in French today.

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Here There Was Once a Country

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Oberlin College Press, 2001

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.

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Unauthorized Voices

Essays on Poets and Poetry, 1987-2009

Marilyn Hacker

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Praise for Marilyn Hacker:

"How piercing the duet we're offered between Marilyn Hacker and the reality principle. Reality saying, it’s impossible, something's always sacrificed: you can't be so merry and so raw; so learned and earthy; so gut-wrenching, so danceable at once. Can you? To which, steadily, the voice of Marilyn Hacker: Yes. Evidently; Evidently so."
---Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Epistemology of the Closet and Touching Feeling

"Hacker is one of our best singers---by turns elegiac and fierce, sweet and witty. With each new collection her voice grows richer, more resonant, sorrowing and lovely."
---Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

"Marilyn Hacker joins a marvelous facility with poetic forms to a shockingly intense sensuality. Not unlike Baudelaire, you might say, and indeed like him, she shares a taste for excess, drink, Paris, women, crowds. 'Enivrez-vous!' Baudelaire ordered his readers, and Marilyn Hacker has taken his advice seriously."
---Edmund White, author of Hotel de Dream, City Boy, and Le Flâneur

"Everything is thrilling and true, fast and witty, deep and wise; her vitality is the pulse of life itself."
---Derek Mahon, author of Harbour Lights and An Autumn Wind

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

For over twenty years, award-winning poet, translator, and editor Marilyn Hacker has been writing incisive criticism and reviews of contemporary poetry, with particular attention to the work of feminist poets, poets of color, and any poets whose work she judged worthy of more attention from the American (and sometimes British) reading public.

Unauthorized Voices is Hacker’s first collection of critical prose, bringing together her essays on American, British, Irish, and French poets. It includes pieces on Adrienne Rich, Hayden Carruth, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Harrison, Marilyn Nelson, and June Jordan; on French and Francophone poets including Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Guy Goffette; on poetry and politics; and on the contemporary sonnet, all affirming Hacker as a lively, unabashedly opinionated American critical voice.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Names and Essays on Departure, and of ten collections of poetry translated from the French, including Marie Étienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, recipient of the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has been the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the National Book Award for her own poetry and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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Where Are the Trees Going?

Vénus Khoury-Ghata Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

Northwestern University Press, 2014

Longlist finalist, 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Bringing the work of acclaimed poet Venus Khoury-Ghata to a new generation of anglophone readers, renowned award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker has rendered Khoury-Gata's highly praised collection Où vont les arbres? into unforgettable English verse. In it, Khoury-Ghata takes on perennial themes of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict. Characters take root in her memory as weathered trees and garden plants, lending grit and body to the imaginative collection. As bracing as the turn of seasons, Where Are the Trees Going? highlights a poet writing with renewed urgency and maturity.

Khoury-Ghata's collection has been translated into fifteen languages. In this special edition, Paris-resident Hacker has also included selections from Khoury-Ghata's short fiction collection La maison aux orties (The House of Nettles). The resulting interplay illuminates the poet’s contrasting and complementary drives toward surreal lyricism and stark narrative exposition.

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