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.
“For more than half a century, Marilyn Hacker has managed to both handle the sonnet—and the crown!—with care and wield it like a weapon. This, then, is a book of evidence: Hacker’s use of the thirteenth-century form shows readers that poetry is always contemporary and that there is no subject unworthy. These are poems of motherhood and poems protesting genocide and poems of survival and of death, and as Hacker herself might say, ‘I know just enough to mourn / yesterday’s dead.’ Hacker’s sonnets remind me that ‘fine’ was one the highest compliments for connoisseurs of fine art. She is a fine poet.”—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
“To read Marilyn Hacker’s Transitions: New and Selected Sonnets is to be reawakened to the far reaches of what the form can contain, and the glorious dimensions of a life in poetry. Each sonnet functions like a strand of DNA that in its elegant specificity holds a map of the totality: love poems and lust poems and love and lust poems, the speaker unfurling into queerness, poems of war and other violations, illness and an escalating limp, and overarching it all, death that instigates the kind of grief that is not a phase but a bottom line, requires language and silence in equal measure to endure it, death that performs like a Shakespearean actor its job of foreshadowing our own. The exquisite designs of the sonnet crowns alone are evidence that we are in the presence of royalty. How fortunate we are to live in Marilyn Hacker’s time.”—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry
"In Transitions, Marilyn Hacker juxtaposes the compact form of the sonnet with a capacious survey of time and place, paying homage to love and absence. This rich collection of a life fully lived speaks from the experience of translator, lover, lesbian, and feminist—from youth and age. I applaud these smart, honest poems that detail both the joie de vivre and the ennui of living. This is a collection to be savored."—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
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