Hacker, Marilyn

Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Life-Changing, Sexy, Alive...
  • Beginning to end of a love affair in sonnet form?!!
  • Stepping carefully through old relations
Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons
Marilyn Hacker
Manufacturer: Arbor House Pub Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

20th Century20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
GeneralGeneral | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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Hacker, MarilynHacker, Marilyn | ( H ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0877958408

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Life-Changing, Sexy, Alive..........2000-02-05

A pregnant pause between word three and four of one of these sonnets changed my life. Hacker writes an accessible, witty, beautiful, tender, sexy masterpiece (a novel, really) which has become, since its pub date, a folk rite-of-passage for many readers (even non-poetry lovers), a pole-raising standard for other poets, and the source for many phrases worth remembering: from "age is not the muddle of the matter" to the rhyming of "fit of pique" with "geste heroique." This is a page-turning classic -- erudite, lyrical, and peopled by women one would want to know. A smart person's tour de force!

5 out of 5 stars Beginning to end of a love affair in sonnet form?!!.......1998-12-02

One of my favorite books of poetry ever. No matter the gender of my lover, this is the book I read when things are going great...and when they fall apart. Sexy, deep, and gorgeous language. I'm always grateful she's around.

5 out of 5 stars Stepping carefully through old relations.......1998-05-28

Marilyn Hacker through her poetry describes her life with her lover, both in New York and Paris. She, being older, talks about insecurities and the torture of being away from the one you love. From the first meeting to the phone call goodbye, Marilyn describes the appropriate lust over another person. This poetry is amazing.
Poetry to Heal Your Blues (Portable Poetry)
Average customer rating: Not rated
    Poetry to Heal Your Blues (Portable Poetry)

    Manufacturer: M Q Publications
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Hardcover

    AnthologiesAnthologies | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
    GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
    Inspirational & ReligiousInspirational & Religious | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
    Hacker, MarilynHacker, Marilyn | ( H ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
    ASIN: 1840726687
    Release Date: 2005-09-13

    Book Description

    It can be hard to share your pain with others when the words for such raw emotions seem impossible to express. When you're deep into the blues, and your world feels dark, find a quiet place, open the pages of this beautiful book, and let the healing power of poetry pour into your soul. What you will discover in this wonderful collection are 100 poems that will take your blues away. They have been chosen with care and thought from the abundant resources of American and international writing. Favorite poets of the past such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens stand alongside the newer voices of Robert Bly, Louise Glick, W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Galway Kinnell, Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Marilyn Hacker, Dorianne Laux, James Wright, and others. Though they all speak with different voices, these poets find their own, miraculous words to expose pain and through this exposure, heal it.
    Taking Notice
    Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    • SENSITIVE, PROFOUND, SIMPLE & DOWN TO EARTH.
    Taking Notice
    Marilyn Hacker
    Manufacturer: Knopf
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback
    ASIN: 0394739175
    Release Date: 1980-09-12

    Customer Reviews:

    5 out of 5 stars SENSITIVE, PROFOUND, SIMPLE & DOWN TO EARTH........1998-10-27

    MARILYN HACKER DIGS DEEP INTO MANY RAW FEELINGS AND TRANSFORM THEM INTO THE CELESTINES FOREVER HOUNDING AND TEARING US APART. SUCH SIMPLE IMAGERIES...CROSSING CULTURAL BORDERS. I AM A FILIPINO AND YET...I UNDERSTAND WHAT SHE IS TALKING ABOUT. WOMEN ARE WOMEN, EVERYWHERE.
    She Says: Bilingual Edition
    Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    • De(con)struction & (re)construction of words
    • Surrealist Poet With A Heart
    • Reviewing what She Said
    • Review "She Says"
    • Elle Dit
    She Says: Bilingual Edition
    Venus Khoury-Ghata
    Manufacturer: Graywolf Press
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

    GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
    Continental EuropeanContinental European | Single Authors | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
    Hacker, MarilynHacker, Marilyn | ( H ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
    Similar Items:
    1. Here There Was Once a Country
    2. A House at the Edge of Tears (Lannan Translation Selection)

    ASIN: 1555973833

    Book Description

    Award-winning American poet Marilyn Hacker offers the brilliance of Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata in an exquisite translation

    She says
    the earth is so vast one can’t help but be lost like water from a broken jug
    There is no fortress against the wind
    the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls
    —from “She Says”

    Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s She Says explores the mythic and confessional attractions and repulsions of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like “a suitcase filled with alphabets.” Sex, barrenness, grief, and death—the backdrop of a war-ravaged country—are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.

    Customer Reviews:

    5 out of 5 stars De(con)struction & (re)construction of words.......2004-10-19

    On first reading of Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says I feared that I must somehow be intellectually stunted. I didn't get it and I mean that in the worse sense of the phrase. I found myself reading page after page wondering when I would get it. I then became angry at her for writing an entire collection of poems that I, an MFA student, did not get. I thought perhaps something crucial had been lost in the in the transition between Khoury-Ghata's maternal Arabic thoughts, her school-bred French écriture and Hacker's English. So I read the poems backwards, read the original French texts (I'm mostly bilingual) and still I was lost. So I had an herbal remedy. and a bubble bath. My mind began following the archipelago of bubbles floating in my tub water and I had an epiphany. I grabbed the book again. My mind had been tight, constricted and rigid, a state not conducive to playfulness. My very being had worked against the poet. This time I let her words play with me, rearrange me. And I got it.
    Her poetry rests in a sacred place where words do not wish to be disturbed into order, where chaos reigns. And yet each poem resonates with a concreteness, a sadness. a stream draws a closed circle around her house/once stepped across the water turns like bad milk. (p. 73) I feel a sense of regret and mortality in her final lines. It's as if she knows the potentialities in our self-expression. The sadness I feel is our knowing that it can only exist here, confined within these pages.
    At times I considered that English is too limiting a language to ever convey Khoury-Ghata's thoughts. This seams certainly true with the poem that begins "Les morts dit-elle/sont clos sur eux-mêmes comme le sang." (p. 64) "Morts" could easily be read as "mots" the French word for "Word," so that the English translation would read, " The words she says/are closed in upon themselves like blood," instead of "The dead she says." And yet there are places where the English translations resonate more strongly. On pgs 16-17, the sounds in "letters buried in their silicate vestments/become silenced sounds in the silenced silt" reveals more than in "des lettres enfouies dans leur vêtement de silice/devenues sons éteints dans la vase éteinte."
    I envy Khoury-Ghata. Living in the space between two languages is in many ways a literary blessing. Her natural detachment from the French language allows her to play with words in a way that most of never could. I am reminded of Natalie Goldberg's thoughts on writing in her book Writing Down the Bones. She says that if we think "cut the daisy from my throat," then that is precisely what we should write down. But we censor ourselves, and in doing so we limit ourselves. Khoury-Ghata is consciously fighting against our urge to order and make sense of our words. She writes "One marries the words of one's own language/to settle down/ traveling is for the others/who borrow lines the way they take the train." It is this traveling that I envy, her ability to stay "single" when we are pressured to settle down with our language. Only through de(con)struction of our own language can we rebuild it in our own image, which might be feminine, androgynous, hyper-sexualized, depending on the creator. The idea is that it becomes our own and frees us. I realize now my anger was envy...of her ability and willingness to (re)construct herself.

    5 out of 5 stars Surrealist Poet With A Heart.......2004-10-19

    I thought this book was fabulous! It is not often that we encounter, either in literature or in art, a marriage of surrealistic imagery with sincere emotion. Frequently, it seems that when surrealism becomes a major component in a literary work, the result is a barrage of strange and disconnected images holding little meaning beyond the apparent. few writers are able to instill such works with true heart and soul as does Venus-Khoury-Gata. The fantastic images that fill the pages of her book are rich in layers of metaphorical meaning, vibrant with the feeling she attaches to each. She thereby miraculously transforms these unexpected and dislocted objects--a "drainpipe" connecting the mouth of the petitioner to the ear of God, the "toe's" of apple trees--into vehicles of the soul which she definitely bares here. Much is to be said, as well, for the undoubtedly challenging job of translation completed here by poet Marilyn Hacker. The effort involved in such a feat, not to mention the result, dazzles the mind.

    5 out of 5 stars Reviewing what She Said.......2004-10-18

    Venus Khoury-Ghata is a master of words. She swims in language, dives in her alphabet soup, and splashes us until we drip. She Says is a compilation of poems that converse with each other, wink at each other. Each poem bursts as you read it, like bubble wrap, when you squeeze one of its tight bulbs.

    Before I started reading She Says, I skimmed the book, and was struck by the fact that the poems do not have titles. Well, the first line of each poem serves as a title. In the table of contents, these lines stand under each other, and read as a poem:

    Words
    -In those days I know now words declaimed the wind
    -Words
    -Where do words come from?
    -How to find the name of the fisherman who hooked the first word
    -The prudent man looped his family to his belt
    -Language at that time opened fire on every noise
    -What do we know about the alphabets which didn't survive the rising of waters
    -The words which spring up on the borders of lips retain their terrors
    -Words, she says, used to be wolves
    -Words, she says, are like the rain everyone knows how to make them
    -It was there and nowhere else
    -The rain had few followers at that time
    -Guilty of repeated forgetfulness
    -There are words from poor peoples' gardens that crossbreed iron and thorns

    Before I actually started reading the book, I was reading it.

    Though some have mentioned that She Says lacks punctuation, or that Khoury-Ghata's use of negative space is her only punctuation, I noticed the use of question marks. This fact begs the question-why question marks, and not periods? Perhaps because periods seal declarative sentences, and Khoury-Ghata does not want to seal the issue of language--its potential and transcendence; she wants to unfold it. She is not declaring, she is asking.

    Why not use commas (they do not seal)? Commas make a reader pause, and Khoury-Ghata is working with impulse. She Says cannot have commas, like a rollercoaster cannot have commas. The lack of punctuation also makes words, thoughts, and ideas bleed into each other, much like our thinking process. Khoury-Ghata is thinking on paper.

    She Says is a book you have to read and reread. The images are exquisitely chosen and precisely placed, yet it appears effortless. These poems feed you. After reading them, you are full, satisfied, like a three year old after eating a bowl of alphabet soup the size of its head.

    4 out of 5 stars Review "She Says".......2004-10-18

    In Hacker's introduction, she states that Khoury-Ghata has said, (in reference to her own writing) "the rhythms and tropes of her poetic line are as much influenced by the sound of spoken Arabic and Arabic poetry as they are by the comparative austerity of French verse". (x) The catch is that the poems are translated into English, so in my reading of the book, I can almost guarantee that certain rhythms were lost that may have contributed to certain emphasis that I missed. However, that being said, the poetry was well written and made wonderful points about people's speech in general and then specifically for and about women. The first section's translation was probably the most on target in the translation, given that the focus was on words and could be applied to all languages. However, the poetry has now been, in a sense, through two translations, one direct and one indirect. My small amount of knowledge about the French language compared to English is the consonant values, so, as I said before, the emphasis was probably lost. The second section, "she says" is more focused on women with references to "sex, grief and death." One intriguing repetition is that of "she says", "she understands", because regardless of a language barrier, or things lost in translation, or any other barrier, many women and even men can play the role of the aforementioned "she", so the book opens itself to a larger audience, even to men. One of the best sets of lines is on page 89: "She taught it the twenty-one ways to walk against the wind / and how to get up before the lamp without offending it // It kept a sorrowful silence confronted by the first snow/ and the woman's first white hairs / convinced that God was wasting his stock of chalk". "It" being a traveler and painting a picture of saving a woman, which "it" may not even be. She presents the grief of aging, of fear, of waste, of worth. Lastly, the continuing words with absolutely no punctuation bring forth the common theme that the battles with sex grief love and hurt are interminable.

    5 out of 5 stars Elle Dit.......2004-10-18

    Venus Khoury-Ghata exemplifies a true denizen of a multilingual and polyphonic world with her ability to swing back and forth between languages and, thus, disparate modes of thought to establish a new and unique manner in utilizing language. Marilyn Hacker shares a similar space by being Khoury-Ghata's translator in She Says. As a renown poet, herself, Hacker is able to also inhabit a transliminal lingual and literary area by moving from American English to French to read Khoury-Ghata, but has to return to English with her subsequent translation of Khoury-Ghata's verse. She seems to do this seamlessly as her translations of the French follow as comfortably as possible and Hacker's voice remains a whisper in those transliterations.

    In She Says, Khoury-Ghata moves in between languages and worlds, the real and the surreal, and she uses words and phrases that spark the imagination and disrupt our usual tropes. On p. 67, she writes -
    "Because there's no shortage of summers
    the days are like conceited generals
    the nights like flashy women
    the moon is the tool they work with
    it regulates their urges and their blood"

    "But it sometimes happens that they dream a bit of widowhood and darknesses
    The sesame seeds sewn in their skirts weigh down their shadows
    the lampposts bow gently as they pass by
    and the fireflies part the air with their two hands"

    Khoury-Ghata's lack of punctuation in She Says helps her verse to flow like billowing clouds. Her use of negative space is sparse and purposeful and serves as her only actual punctuation. I found her economic use of verse to be both fascinating and inspiring.

    As Khoury-Ghata states in the proceeding section titled "Why I Write in French," she quotes Andre Brincourt who says that "`the Francophone culture is rich in the diversity of the tongues which nourish it.'" She is staggering in her ability to flow between languages and modes of thought and this I believe will help to strengthen the French language overall. She Says is a good portent for those of us who are still trying to deal with the imposition of colonizing languages and the resulting trauma in trying to reconcile maternal and former tongues with the new dominant language. Language must be dynamic to mutate and evolve, otherwise it becomes stagnant and dies. And along the lines of Brincourt and Khoury-Ghata, I believe that such tension between dominant and non-dominant languages can only serve to strengthen language in general and increase the level of communication among the human species. As Khoury-Ghata writes, "Writing in Arabic by means of French doesn't prevent me from listening attentively to the latter..." These are words to live by as someone who also seeks to broadcast the different cultural signals that every individual receives.
    Presentation Piece
    Average customer rating: Not rated
      Presentation Piece
      Marilyn Hacker
      Manufacturer: Viking Adult
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Hardcover

      United StatesUnited States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | 18th Century | 19th Century | 20th Century | African American | Asian American | Classics | Collections & Readers | Drama | General | Hispanic | History & Criticism | Humor | Jewish American | Letters & Correspondence | Native American | Poetry | Short Stories | Women Writers
      ASIN: 067057399X
      Here There Was Once a Country
      Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
      • A Wise and Vibrant Universe
      Here There Was Once a Country
      Venus Khoury-Ghata
      Manufacturer: Oberlin College Press
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

      FrenchFrench | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
      GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
      Continental EuropeanContinental European | Single Authors | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
      Hacker, MarilynHacker, Marilyn | ( H ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
      Similar Items:
      1. She Says: Bilingual Edition

      ASIN: 0932440894

      Book Description

      Lebanese writer Venus 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, presented here in distinguished translations by Marilyn Hacker.

      Customer Reviews:

      5 out of 5 stars A Wise and Vibrant Universe.......2003-02-24

      Venus Khoury-Ghata has written a beautiful, unusual book of poems, beautifully translated by Marilyn Hacker. Khoury-Ghata is Lebanese, speaking Arabic and French. The two languages seem to form a musical counterpoint that underlies her energized imagery. Her line is simple and declarative, but her imagined universe is enormously vibrant and animate. Wind moves it; water pours through it. Earth, sky, stones, trees, walls are constantly in motion, undergoing metamorphoses even when death, the opposite of change, is the prevailing subject.

      Her title, <Here There Was Once a Country>, refers less to Lebanon, torn apart by war, than to the lost landscape of sustenance provided by her husband and mother. "The Dead Man's Monologue," a poem-series on her husband's death, portrays grief deeply and accurately. The point of view is his -- his soul that lives while the body is gone -- but the pronoun is third person. Through this device, doubly shielded from rhetorical excess or self-pity, she reveals the intensity of her pain. But in the section that follows, "Seven Honeysuckle Sprigs of Wisdom," wit and gentle joy pervade observations of her mountain village, whose inhabitants live, speak, embody and defy the elements as boldly as the flying figures in Chagall's surrealist paintings. The "Early Childhood" section evokes her mother, who manifests as wind, water, sky, sun, stars, house, goddess-like in power but ordinary as her broom while she fills the whole of space around the little girl. It is a familiar theme treated with refreshing originality as it replicates the child-mind merging the truths and fantasies of maternal presence.

      Oberlin's Field Translation Series has done well to support Hacker's ongoing project of making contemporary French women poets known to English-speaking readers. This book reminds us of the basic realities experienced in every human life in every country. It serves as welcome solace, friend and peace-maker in this aggression-ridden world.
      First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979: Presentation Piece, Separations, Taking Notice
      Average customer rating: Not rated
        First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979: Presentation Piece, Separations, Taking Notice
        Marilyn Hacker
        Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Paperback

        20th Century20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        GeneralGeneral | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        United StatesUnited States | Single Authors | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        Hacker, MarilynHacker, Marilyn | ( H ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        ASIN: 039332432X

        Book Description

        The first three books of one of our best poets, including her National Book Award-winning volume Presentation Piece, plus Separations and Taking Notice. "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
        Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
        Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
        • Read the Book
        • Study your French
        • Got Time?
        • Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
        • Hacker's review
        Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
        Marilyn Hacker
        Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Paperback

        20th Century20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        GeneralGeneral | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        United StatesUnited States | Single Authors | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
        Hacker, MarilynHacker, Marilyn | ( H ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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        2. Squares and Courtyards: Poems
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        4. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
        5. Leadbelly (The National Poetry Series)

        ASIN: 0393326306

        Book Description

        One of our strongest poets of conscience confronts the dangerous new century with intelligence, urbanity, and elegiac humor.</B>

        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.

        Customer Reviews:

        5 out of 5 stars Read the Book.......2004-01-07

        I'm glad there are some blank pages in the back of this book because it gives me a place to jot notes. What's happened around this book since it's publication-silence-(i.e. so few reviews) is part and partial/symptomatic of what the poet decries in her first poem-a prologue to the rest of the book-as the "abandoned dissident discourse" brought on by "leaden words like `Homeland.'"

        Are reviewers too lazy, too busy, too afraid to take on the challenges a book like this puts forth? This book asks that we do our homework or that we be as well read, as engaged in the real world of current and past politics and policies as the author is. The book calls for each reader to write his/her own reader's guide (much as Hacker's earlier poem "Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found" demanded: "Make your own footnotes; it will do you good.")

        Hacker's aim, in part, is to make us aware of the people, the public people, who populate her text, people such as June Jordon, Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Neruda, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Hayden Carruth, all of them politically engaged poets who considered themselves charged, as poets, with the duty to speak out against the ills of the world around them. As Hacker does.

        Poetry is for an elite few! Poof! This poetry is available to anyone who takes the time to read it-to shut off CNN, "Friends" and FOX News and delight in the sounds that cascade and roll over us and give us what the best poetry has forever: delight to the ear because of its musical/verbal genius, its use of assonance, consonance, rhyme of every kind, alliteration. The poems deliver the kind of pleasure successfully completing a jigsaw puzzle does and at the same time hit home with their portrayal of human experiences that most of us have lived through: the loss of a loved one to cancer, the experience of being jilted by a lover, the fear of death, the fear of life as we know it today in the "homeland."

        Read it and think. Read it and look up the proper names. Read it and weep. Read it and carry on.

        3 out of 5 stars Study your French.......2003-12-11

        Marilyn Hacker's collection of poems, Desesperanto, is a blend of American subjects and French flair. The poetry collection is a look into the woman herself. Her thoughts, concerns in the world, and her sorrow of the friends that she has lost in the recent years. The poems here are very thought provoking and insightful. They are designed to challenge the reader to go a step beyond the passive reading most are accustomed to. Hacker's use of the French language is designed to add melody and rhythm to the poems, while forcing the reader to run and find a French-to-English dictionary. I'm not sure if this is a book I would choose for beginning poetry classes. It is a work that I would recommend for advance poetry fans and perhaps a women's literature course.
        My personal favorite out of the collection is "English 182." The poem explores the emotions of an English professor (Hacker) attempting to gain some sense of her students. The speaker singles out a young African-American student that never participates in class discussions and eventually plagiarizes a paper. The speaker responds by reaching out to the student, by attempting to teach on African-American female poets.
        The poem reaches out to me as a Black student because I have often felt isolated in all White classes, learning about figures that I cannot relate to. Despite the fact that the speaker does teach about Black women, it can be very difficult to speak up in a class where you are the only minority. It is my experience that many professors often feel that Black Students should feel obligated to speak out in class. They feel that if there is little representation of the Black race in the class, those few students should feel compelled to speak up for the entire population. Rather than feeling obligated to speak, my of these students retreat into their own shell when faced with the task of being the only Black in class. Hacker does a great job exploring the issues of failure with the poem. I would love to see her tap into theme of insufficient minority representation in the university setting.

        4 out of 5 stars Got Time?.......2003-12-10

        If you don't have a lot of time on your hands, or have difficulty getting through poetry, then this book is not for you. This is definitely an advanced read, it's not just a curl up by the fire type book, it's an intense work of art. Her vast knowledge of two different worlds (Paris and America) have been brought together here in this book. She does a great job of relating extraordinary things, to your ordinary person. Hacker is lyrical, and have a magnificent way with words. There are many poems in this book that stand out. She is a very literal writer, it is very evident that her whole heart is put into her work. When you read this, you have a sense of her, what she is about. I enjoyed this book, it is a great way to get your mind jumping, and thinking, and working. If that's what you are looking for, then this is it. If you are looking for an easy read, then stick with nursery rhymes.

        3 out of 5 stars Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002.......2003-12-10

        Ashley Braswell

        If you don't have a lot of time on your hands, or have difficulty getting through poetry, then this book is not for you. This is definitely an advanced read, it's not just a curl up by the fire type book, it's an intense work of art. Her vast knowledge of two different worlds (Paris and America) have been brought together here in this book. She does a great job of relating extraordinary things, to your ordinary person. Hacker is lyrical, and have a magnificent way with words. There are many poems in this book that stand out. She is a very literal writer, it is very evident that her whole heart is put into her work. When you read this, you have a sense of her, what she is about. I enjoyed this book, it is a great way to get your mind jumping, and thinking, and working. If that's what you are looking for, then this is it. If you are looking for an easy read, then stick with nursery rhymes.

        3 out of 5 stars Hacker's review.......2003-12-10

        After reading Hacker's book Desesperanto I felt like I knew her with out knowing her. She writes beautifully about her life, friends, where she grew up, her get-away place(Paris), and her strong opinions about politics. Through imagery and word usage she gives the reader the setting, the time, and the emotional state she was in. You can hear the train in New York, see the cafes in Paris, and smell the Lapsang Souchong. The use of French gives you a better sense of what she was trying to capture in this collection and a good explanation of her life in New York and in Paris.
        Winter Numbers: Poems
        Average customer rating: Not rated
          Winter Numbers: Poems
          Marilyn Hacker
          Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Inc
          ProductGroup: Book
          Binding: Hardcover

          20th Century20th Century | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
          GeneralGeneral | Poetry | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
          GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
          United StatesUnited States | Single Authors | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
          Hacker, MarilynHacker, Marilyn | ( H ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
          Similar Items:
          1. Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002
          2. Squares and Courtyards: Poems
          3. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
          4. Rapture

          ASIN: 039303674X

          Amazon.com

          Marilyn Hacker's Winter Numbers is a meditation on death, a collection of painful poems in the wake of losing loved ones to AIDS and cancer. The numbers referred to here are the metronomic beats of passing time, the mile markers on life's journey, the months remaining in a doctor's grim prognosis. The only solace is in connection, as Hacker writes in Year's End: "Underneath the numbers, how lives are braided." Highly recommended for the mortal.
          Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems 1980-2005
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            Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems 1980-2005
            Marilyn Hacker
            Manufacturer: Carcanet Press Ltd
            ProductGroup: Book
            Binding: Paperback

            GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
            Single AuthorsSingle Authors | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | British & Irish | Continental European | United States
            ASIN: 1903039789

            Authors:

            1. Hagedorn, Jessica
            2. Haggard, H. Rider
            3. Haldane, Sean
            4. Haldeman, Joe
            5. Haley, Alex
            6. Hall, Donald
            7. Jónas Hallgrímsson
            8. Hallgrímsson, Jónas
            9. Hamburger, Michael
            10. Hamill, Janet

            Authors

            Authors