Marilyn Hacker Research Articles

Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie

Reviewed by: Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie Katharine Jager Cary Howie. Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 190 pp. $130.00. Cary Howie's Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body is a series of comparative readings, or what he calls "an especially concentrated set of turns and returns" (53), that range across a wide selection of texts including contemporary American lyric poetry, Italian and French medieval poetry, medieval theology and hagiography, and twentieth-century continental philosophy. In a delicate, beautiful mash-up, Howie presses together seemingly disparate texts to marshal claims about meditation, theology, desire, and the bounds of the embodied self. Comprising nine brief chapters, the book is also framed by a series of Howie's original free-verse poems or "interludes" that reflect concerns with lyric [End Page 405] questions of praise, deixis, prayer, and belief, expressed in a diction that is simultaneously casual ("face down / ass up, that's the way we like"; xi) and theological (as expressed in the title on Interlude 2: "Puking Prayer"; 125). As he notes, "the poetic word is always an incarnate word, a tongue, a body spoken and speaking," and poetry itself "takes place in and as religious discourse, conceptual argument, God-talk, prayer" (9). Howie begins with an analysis of American poet Mary Szybist's poem "The Troubadours, Etc.," which he uses to ground his notion of "transfiguration," or an embodied, spiritual "light that makes something newly visible, even as it appears to disappear" (1). "Transfiguration" guides Howie's concept of "lyric medievalism," or the ways that the contemporary poets he reads "have started to sound like medieval theologians, or, in fact, like certain holistic modern readers of medieval theology, especially in their accounts of the human body in its limitations and at its limits" (147), and he presses twentieth-century anglophone poetry against medieval theological texts. For instance, Howie's first chapter, "Toward Transfiguration," reads Laura Kasischke, Matt Donovan, the account in Matthew's Gospel of the hemorrhaging woman reaching for Christ's hem, Linda Hull, Aquinas, Augustine, Marie Howe, and Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, to argue that "to be transfigured is to undergo, at the surface of the body, an intensification of this body that does not leave it intact, if by 'intact' we understand all too literally, 'untouched'" (24). His second chapter, "Saints, Poets, and Other Crossover Artists," extends this concern for the body's edges and apertures. Using Barbara Newman's concept of the medieval crossover artist to weave readings of sci-fi; mid-century American fiction; Boccaccio; philosophy; theology; medieval studies; and the lyrics of Mary Karr, Kasischke, and Mary Oliver, Howie argues that these writers are able to express "something so fundamentally accommodating of the world—its ugliness, its beauty—that it challenges the very discursive and categorical prejudices of our critical language" (44). Chapter 3, "Monastic Poetics," is Howie's strongest chapter. In it, he considers discretio across and through readings of Jane Hirshfield, Foucault, the Conferences of John Cassian, Benedict's Rule, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Thomas Merton on Mark Van Doren, Guigo II the Carthusian's Ladder of Monks, Melissa Range's "Shell White," and Marilyn Hacker's "Annunciation, 8 A.M." Howie argues here that monastic poetics, in its use of discernment and discipline, is "not afraid to find occasions for prayer in situations of impurity" (68). His fourth chapter, "Waiting for the Middle Ages," considers Catherine Brown, Carla Freccero, and Carolyn Dinshaw's [End Page 406] recent claims about temporality and medievalism to wonder "how we, singularly and in common, are taken by the objects and the persons we attend to and how they, more often than not, if we wait for and with them, take us by surprise" (74–75). Howie reads Beroul's Tristan; Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et de Marion; Dante's Inferno, XVI; Bernard of Clairvaux; Caroline Bynum; Marie Howe's "The Gate"; theology; literary criticism; and philosophy; as well as Paul's letter to the Romans; to...

Museum Piece, and: Canicule

Museum Piece, and: Canicule Marilyn Hacker (bio) Museum Piece Beirut Once, Phoenician triremes stood in harbour,poised for merchant journeys of exploration.Honey, wine, gems, dyes for a purple tunic,scarabs and daggers. There were artefacts in the small museumon the campus nobody ever came to—goddess statues, bracelets, rings, swords, toy wagons,Tadmor tomb portraits, lively, saddened faces, a bit of makeup.A clay hippopotamus, painted azure:toy or minor deity? The explosionundid curators' care as it did doctors', grandfathers', mothers'.But the feral cats, who survived, as alwaysbask in light, millennial, the debris ofAugust around them. [End Page 17] Canicule A rainy Monday, everything is shut.It could be late October; it's mid-May.Lights on at noon, outside, rain drums on graypaving stones, drainpipes, voices. Nothing butwater on roof tiles in a steady beat,the postman's motorcycle passing by,not stopping. Tomorrow, the bakery,grocer, butcher—bread, vegetables, meat,revivifying possibilityof a "bonjour' exchanged with an unknownperson, whose eyes express the smile,question, mistrust or curiosityher or his face mask almost hides, as Iexhale uneasily behind my own. Exhale uneasily. Behind my ownpretense of standing firmly, I'm unsteadyon my feet, impatient but unreadyto take one more step, toward some overgrownweed-wilded plot. Leaden feet weigh me downon the empty morning street. Ahead, Isee the post office, clock tower. I buy bread. Ibuy a bunch of red onions. The townis quiet as the plague that got its clawsinto the blue-green globe a year ago.Queasily accustomed to the lawsthat change monthly, the shops shuttered because . . .I make my way, awkwardly lame and slow,up sloping streets out of DiChirico. Up sloping streets out of DiChirico,too clean, too empty, garrulous grans indoors, [End Page 18] kids quiet, holiday-rental visitorsquarantined in cities, the status quois stasis. Now, here, stays here and now:curfew, a trajectory that blursthe border of the ten kilometresallowed beyond the door. Today, tomorrow,something will change, the wind, the rules, the weather,a numbness, swelling, or suspicious cough.Yesterday, in late sunlight, on an off-road, a brown horse stood in a field,flanks aglow in the slant light, untetheredand shimmering in a stasis that seemed wild. Shimmering in a stasis that seems wild,unseasonable, unpredictableas thunderstorms or canicule in April,the certainty of change. There was a tiledcorridor; the amputated, undefiledtorso of a boy in stippled marble;a bird that cawed, that whistled, one that warbled;a sketch of an old man reading, sketch of a childherself bending to draw a hopscotch gridnear the gazebo on the village square.I sat on a bench there. I thought of Claireeighty-two years ago—a similarvillage, the same grid, during the drôle de guerre,not thinking she'd write about it. But she did. Not thinking he'd write about it, still, he did,first scribbling birdtracks on a yellow linedpad—place-names, objects left behind,in his three languages. He stopped in mid-phrase (they weren't sentences) as a word fled,or was it the object, shimmering in mind,but disappearing, shrinking to a blindspot with a velvet aura. He shook his head,rubbed his eyes, squinting, put down the pen, [End Page 19] light pricking them like summer dust that stings.Beyond the window, a street full of thingsin motion, even when they were still.That wasn't the road leading out of TellAbyad, that he was walking on again, Walking out of the ruined town again,having gone back to probe the rubble, lookfor what was left of the school, the mosque, the book-shop, where after school daily eight or tenchildren would awkwardly appear, and listento tales they'd coax from him—he shook,despite himself. Here was the souk,or had been. No man'ouche, no heaps of greenand russet vegetables, no polyesterdjellabas, no men, no women, no mercantilepalaver, only an urban vacant lot,cardboard boxes, dogshit, a scrawny cat,and plastic...

Ghazal with a radif taken from Charles Bernstein . . ., and: Makdisi Street Calligraphies

Ghazal with a radif taken from Charles Bernstein . . ., and: Makdisi Street Calligraphies Marilyn Hacker (bio) Ghazal with a radif taken from Charles Bernstein . . I was up at dawn reading the Graun on election day.My airmailed vote was back in my home town on election day. People preferred a modest man to lead them.The autocrat would have preferred a crown on election day. Often enough, you have to show your papersto cast a ballot if your skin is brown on election day Wasn’t there a horror film, where childrentake poisoned candy from an evil clown on election day? Six hundred children in detention centersor foster homes, whose parents can’t be found on election day. A Kurd from Ilam dove into the churningwaves while his boat sank. He drowned on election day. The autocrat loosened his tight red necktie.His wife drank vodka in her dressing gown on election day. Protestors marched to the golden tower, turnedtheir backs to it, and pulled their trousers down on election day. Alone in quarantine I’m a bad witness.Was “Change” a verb, or static abstract noun on election day? [End Page 19] Makdisi Street Calligraphies For Fady Joudah Wine fucked up my sleep,one glass of white Obeidywith dinner for one, the pile of dictionariespushed aside on the oilcloth. Alone or not, Isometimes drink that wine, sleep well.The oud-playing wine merchant on Souraty Streetsmiled, small wry affirmation. * Three small beggar girlsdanced and clowned in front of thehotel manager having a smoke on the steps.He joked with them, had them guess which hand held some coins.One dashed into the lobby,and was chased out. Two ran in again. He took offhis belt, lashed. They fled, laughing. * [End Page 20] Rain lashed the terrace,generator ziggurats,air ducts, washing lines one kitchen window lit up.Clouds scudded past a half-moon. Awakened by dropson the panes, Februarystorm that might bring spring, I looked at my watch in thepenumbra, four-thirty, day. *The hundredth day ofthe intifada, awakehours before too stressed to be resisting.No revolution, only ginger-cinnamontea by the window, curtainspushed aside to watch five street girls run past, shouting“The people want the fall of . . .” * People linger onthe Corniche, kids ride rentedbikes, Sunday fishers [End Page 21] on the rocks. Februarysunlight already feels like spring, could recedeback to rain and riots.Now, garrulous light. Sea behind her, a womanin niqab takes a selfie * Borderline self,outside a revolutionseason that’s changing no one knows yet into what.It’s late for more rain. The boy on the roof acrossthe street—autistic, maybe—there daily, pulls his sweatshirt hood over his head,stares down at the puddling street. * Down Makdisi Streetthe revolutionariesare banging on pans and chanting. Monday morning,maybe the banks will open [End Page 22] and students will getto school, despite roadblocksor being locked in their rooms so they won’t jointhe street cortege banging pans . . . * Wash the frying pan,all the coffee cups, plastictakeout containers, decide what to pack in theswift-departure duffel bag what to leave behind,thinking of Fadwa: “our inkwill be attar and laurel.” Never returned. Wager inthe fridge: half bottle of wine. [End Page 23] Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen poetry collections, including Blazons (Carcanet) and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton), a book of essays, Unauthorized Voices, and eighteen books of translations of French and Francophone poets, most recently Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz (Pleaides Press). A Different Distance, a collaboration with Karthika Naïr, is forthcoming from Milk-weed Editions in December. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press

Triangulating Truths

Triangulating Truths Jaclyn Piudik (bio) Everywoman Her Own Theology: On the Poetry of Alicia Suskin Ostriker Martha Nell Smith and Julie R. Enszer, eds. University of Michigan Press www.press.umich.edu/9958391/everywoman_her_own_theology 212 Pages; Print, $29.95 The work of Alicia Ostriker defies categorization. Ostriker, who was recently named Poet Laureate of New York State, is poet, essayist, scholar, feminist, critic, activist, teacher, humanitarian, partner, and mother. Her pioneering writing spans generations and genres, and has left an ineradicable mark on the literary world. To chart the career of such an accomplished woman of letters, one whose influence continues to evolve, is no simple task. However, Everywoman Her Own Theology, while not a comprehensive study, offers the reader a compelling, erudite encounter with Ostriker’s oeuvre. A collection of eighteen essays, including the book’s introduction by one of its editors, Martha Nell Smith, a student and friend of Ostriker, and one interview, Everywoman Her Own Theology draws its title from one of Ostriker’s poems with the same name, first published in The Imaginary Lover (1986), and gathers a body of outstanding poets and literary critics, including Tony Hoagland, Marilyn Hacker, Toi Derricote and Eleanor Wilner. The essays range from explorations of particular volumes of Ostriker’s poetry, to in-depth studies of individual pieces, to investigations of the themes and phases in her corpus, to her poetics and her scholarly prose. Taken together, the assemblage of essays stands as something of a Festschrift, a tribute to Ostriker’s writings and her impact over the last fifty years. The book is organized in a roughly chronological — but distinctly textured — manner, beginning with Joan Larkin’s interview, which grants the reader a personal acquaintance with the poet herself and a firsthand account of her history and writerly vision. It then progresses from the Blakean impulses of Ostriker’s early writings — Blake was, after all, was the subject of Ostriker’s graduate thesis before she edited his Complete Poems and published widely on his work — through her middle period and leads us to her most recent poetic inquiries, including the 2017 Waiting for the Light. What comes to the fore across the essays in Everywoman Her Own Theology are Ostriker’s preoccupations, her obsessions and, as Jenny Factor so deftly puts it in an examination of the poet’s affinities with Blake, “Alicia Ostriker, World-Builder: The Imaginary Lover, Green Age, and Other Points of Fusion with William Blake,” her use of “poetry [as] the vehicle and the method for cobbling an understanding of the world.” Any successful engagement with Ostriker’s opus would necessarily require attention to its inherent intersections and multiplicities, and to the feminism that lies at its heart. Editors Smith and Julie Enszer have curated a series of essays that does just that, allowing us to come to a deep appreciation of the questions that drive both her poetry and her criticism. Naturally, many of the contributions to the volume delve into a central theme in Ostriker’s work, the struggle with being a woman and a Jew and, by extension, her development as a biblical revisionist, creator of a new mythology which seeks to reconcile a passionate feminist ethos with ancient monotheistic — and patriarchal — religious tradition. Several consider Ostriker’s spiritual enquiries through studies of her ground-breaking 2002 the volcano sequence. For instance, Jill Hammer’s essay on that collection, “When the Mother is Dancing: Maternal Theology in the volcano sequence,” revisits “the maternal,” an early thrust in Ostriker’s canon, deconstructing the poet’s argument for “the mother as a fundamental source of spiritual experience.” In it, she presents a complex reading of the ways in which Ostriker challenges the psychology of the Old Testament “mother,” tying the concept to neo-Pagan and kabbalistic interpretations of the Goddess, the Shekhinah, and, no less significantly, to the human mother in all her guises. Eric Selinger’s thoughtful essay, “Mixed Dancing,” addresses the spiritual motif in the volcano sequence as well, introducing a question that Ostriker herself poses in the preface to The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, 1979-2011 (2012), “What is it...

Renga Summer 2020

Renga Summer 2020 Marilyn Hacker (bio) and Karthika Naïr (bio) From around the world,Lebanese expats are flownback to al-watan— Moscow, Rio, Montreal,Paris—bringing the virus to their homecomingsin Beirut or the Beka'a.Numbers leap. Katia wrote to me a month ago"Our epidemic's over." I know she followsthe news … Cafés reopenedanyway, and crèches. As for the money-changers,were their counters ever closed? —MH, 10 June 2020 ________ Close encounters, let'scall them, of the fifth or sixthkind: in Bareilly, returnee migrants get sousedwith liquid bleach—yes, the kind bottled with dangerto eyes and skin—as cure,by the State, no less, while Delhi shuts hospitaldoors on its nonresidents. —KN, 12 June 2020 ________ Resident of acity, body, state of mindI shrug off under shadows and sun on the QuaiSaint-Bernard. A yoga class salutes the river;a portly couple tangoesto their own cassette. I walk without a mask, asfar as the Jardin des Plantes. —MH, 13 June 2020 [End Page 10] ________ Assemblage, as faras the eye can feed: litchi,melon, mint, mango, moka, peach … corps de sorbet(and ice) glimmer and curtsy, preen, swirl in their traysto carouse with me, Isa,and Nico—plotters of my first sortie outsidehome and hospital. Lambent this dusk, like our blithereunion at Berthillon,Île-Saint-Louis, still Mecca for bon vivants, eachpalate worshipful in queue. —KN, 15 June 2020 ________ In a queue for breadoutside the bakery onthe boulevard: it's almost normal. An almostnormal Sunday market with hand santizerdispensers at entrance points.Almost no distrust of the masked person next inline for cherries, shrimp, courgettes, hummus, samosas.Which merchants have disappeared?Which shoppers I knew vaguely by sight won't I seeagain? It's chilly for June. —MH, 21 June 2020 ________ June, now, is the monthof solstitial nights, roses,and two presidents convinced the grandeur of theirnations—flanking, from north and south, the Atlantic—resides in statues of dead,all too fallible men, to be safeguarded farmore than the breath of today's denizens; convincednaming evils of the pastwould be a crime (mine christened it separatism).How frail must they find our lands? —KN, 27 June 2020 [End Page 11] ________ Old, frail, nonethelessI walked home from Montparnasse,invulnerable for the moment, pink K-wayagainst the drizzle. Almost-midnight streets full ofmostly local mostly youngdrinkers and flâneurs as if nothing had happened.I kept my mask on, except on the Pont de Sullywhere there was no one, onlyreverberations of music on the quais, nextDecamerons, next clusters? —MH, 29 June 2020 ________ Clusters of color—reign of aestival blossoms—caper on Philippe's third- floor balcony. They join usand a madcap even breeze to celebrate this,my first visit in manymonths; first touch of drink (organic) outside home andhospital since early March. —KN, 4 July 2020 ________ "Since we want to marchfrom the hospital to theBDL and set up our tent, we should wear scrubsand masks," Rachid said. Interns, medical studentswere planning one more sit-in."We'll be wearing masks anyway," said Nour. "They foundforty new cases last night." —MH, 6 July 2020 ________ Another new case,in our land: Martine Landry,all of seventy- six, Amnesty activist,acquitted after three years of legal nightmaresfor her solidarityto teen refugees who'd have been wrongly expelled.Oh, we take pride in being playwrights of the greatdeclaration of humanrights—but, it's a show we'd rather tour or licenseabroad than produce at home. —KN, 10 July 2020 [End Page 12] ________ At home, my brain ormy blood churns out symptoms: stress,swellings, dizziness, unhinged by solitude andanxiety. Telephone calls replace dinners,long walks down known, unknown streetsWe're free, but who's "we"? It was a challenge in March.Is it perpetuity? —MH, 11 July 2020 ________ Is it alreadythe end? That was from Nurse D,distractedly, while...

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Carolyn Kuebler When something is created in one context but presented in one that feels profoundly changed, it makes us uneasy. We lose confidence. Does it still make sense, does it still matter? The 24/7 news cycle, which can age a piece of writing beyond recognition over the course of a day, and which seems to speed up and slow down according to each day’s anxiety level, has been operating at a ferocious clip these past few months. How can something that seemed important last winter, when it was possible to make plans, when certain expectations were in place, still matter this summer? Writers who dedicated their full attention and imagination to the work now at hand are faced with the effects of that strange passage of time. Now that all the words and pages are assembled and ready for print, ready for readers online, do they mean the same thing as when they first came together over the past months, the past year? During the winter, and looking ahead to this issue’s release, I had some idea in mind about what NER 41.2 would be about. For once, I thought, I can predict what theme will arise when it’s finally complete. With Marilyn Hacker finalizing her selection of contemporary UK poets, with permissions solidifying around a Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen collage/essay, with Brexit finally taking place, and, on a personal level, with a trip to London planned and partly paid for, I felt a kind of convergence. A theme pertaining to Britain, or maybe to our shared language and historical differences, was sure to arise, and all the poems and stories that are decidedly about something else would find a place in that context, reverberating with that theme, as so often happens as an issue of this magazine takes shape. And while the UK poets feature did come together, and the Brexit referendum was big news early this year, Britishness does not in the end feel like the theme here. Not even for the British poets. The idea that a “British theme” would emerge began to seem as short-sighted as expecting any other issue to have an “American theme.” What would that even mean? Instead of having something to reveal about the UK in particular, what this issue seems instead to reveal is something about persistence—the persistence of each individual piece, over time, over place, over context—and the resilience of the literary creation in general. While it’s only been several months or at most a year since the pieces here were selected, 2020 already feels very different from, and much later and darker than, any date in 2019. While it’s true that certain pieces play a little differently now than they did a few months ago, and that different images and details stand out, sometimes even feeling prescient, overall there’s persistence: their images are still vivid, their humor is still funny, and their truths are still true. [End Page 6] One thing that a magazine like this can do that’s even more pronounced now that our physical spaces are so fraught is to bring dozens of writers together in one place in a meaningful way. Bringing in a troupe of British poets, who themselves are not a coherent group with similar aesthetic or linguistic preferences, opens up borders that are now attempting to close. Their work can travel in a way that we can’t and suggests an alliance, or an affiliation, between contemporary England and our “New England.” Marilyn Hacker, who edited this feature, is a poet who crosses plenty of borders. While our readers will be familiar with her for her own poetry and translations—she has published fourteen books, winning the National Book Award and Lambda Literary Award among others, and first appeared in NER in 1979 and as recently as 2019—editorial work has also long been part of her mission as a literary citizen. She was the first full-time editor of Kenyon Review in 1990 to 1994, served twice as guest editor of Ploughshares, and more recently was, for ten years, part of the editorial...

Epistles from UMass

482 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) encourages such an approach. Moreover, in her discussion about Kafer’s “curative imagination,” Cheyne misses an opportunity to discuss how readers might feel towards the lived experiences of those identified as disabled when it comes to dealing with chronic pain or choosing whether or not to undergo curative procedures. Cheyne’s book is relevant to a wide variety of readers, including those interested in genre studies, literary studies, and cultural disability studies, be it critics or scholars. It is important to emphasize the cultural aspect of Cheyne’s approach because those interested in critical disability studies may be troubled by the areas mentioned in the previous paragraph. The book will also be wellreceived by instructors in both writing and literature classes, writers and teachers of creative writing, and those interested in the medical humanities.—Brenda Tyrrell, Miami University, OH Epistles from UMass. Samuel R. Delany. Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2019. xvi+171 pp. $17.95 pbk. Samuel R. Delany (as he is known on the title pages of his books, but Chip Delany in less formal contexts) is not only one of the best and most interesting writers of our time, but also an unusually versatile one. He has excelled in a number of varieties of fiction: most prominently sf, of course, but also historical fiction, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary realism—not to mention several fictional texts whose genres Delany seems to have virtually invented, such as that remarkable “pornotopic fantasy” (his own term), The Mad Man (1994). He is nearly as distinguished as a writer of nonfiction. He is one of our great autobiographers and also an important scholar, critic, and theorist—of sf, but also of a great many other things, from Wagnerian opera to comic books. The personal letter is yet another of the forms in which Delany has worked, though here his achievement is probably better appreciated by those fortunate enough to be among his correspondents than by the reading public at large. Delany’s letters are notable for their length (the first one I received, before I had ever met him, filled about 20 typed pages), their variety, and their combination of witty high spirits and intellectual rigor. Someday, I hope and expect, industrious scholars will produce a published edition of Delany’s collected correspondence. I cannot guess exactly how large in bulk it will be, but feel sure that it will run to many volumes. So far, however, only a small fraction of this material is available in print. A generation ago, Voyant Publishing brought out 1984: Selected Letters (2000), a fascinating volume that fills 350 closely printed pages and that represents only a selection of the letters Delany composed during or close to the Orwellian year (specifically, between June 1983 and January 1985). I reviewed 1984 in SFS 27.3 (Nov. 2000). Now Wesleyan (Delany’s principal publisher for many years) has brought out this much smaller book. The main text of Letters from Amherst consists of five letters written between February 1989 and September 1991—that is, a few years after the period covered in 1984, and when Delany had taken up his first full-time and permanent academic position as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (he would later go on to hold 483 BOOKS IN REVIEW professorships at SUNY-Buffalo and then at Temple University). Each of the letters is the length of a substantial essay (the longest letter in 1984 is as long as a short book). Three are addressed to the late librarian and bibliographer Robert Bravard, one to the scholar and critic Kathleen Spencer, and one to the fiction writer Erin McGraw. The volume also contains an appendix titled “Letters to Iva,” which includes ten much shorter letters that Delany wrote between July 1984 and August 1988 to his daughter Iva Hacker-Delany (born in 1974 to Delany and the distinguished poet Marilyn Hacker) while she was away at summer camp. The five main letters are not quite so purely narrative as the subtitle of the volume might lead one to expect. But they do contain some...

Ghazal : [inline-graphic 01i], and: Calligraphies XI, and: Makdisi Street Calligraphies

Ghazal : [inline-graphic 01i], and: Calligraphies XI, and: Makdisi Street Calligraphies Marilyn Hacker (bio) Ghazal : Halab, Qamishli, Isdoud, for Ovid, once Rome—in the heartof exile, one name remains home in the heart. There are some stones and a small pile of ash in the desert.There is the silence beneath a magnificent dome in the heart. I look out at a three-quarter moon after three weeks’ confinementthat daily inflames a desire to roam in the heart. Not every old lady—but some—looking frail in the marketor too stout on the bus, has an insolent môme in the heart. The bad gene for cancer I probably got from my father.My blood pressure rises from which chromosome in the heart? Such palpitations, and all of them augur departure,throbbing beneath the unmarked aerodrome in the heart. What’s the djinn in my mind makes me want what I shouldn’t?I created that golem, invited that gnome in the heart. Silenced, the call to , the first bell of matins,in my cloister still start up the same metronome in the heart. your faces look out on all four chambers.If I am not honest with you, there’s no poem in the heart. [End Page 36] Calligraphies XI Fayza said to me“During the day, I’m happy,lonely when it’s dark.” She’s fifty-something, in atiny walk-up in Belleville, and made us kebbewith pomegranate syrup,hummus and fattouch. “When night falls, I’m alone withsolitude.” Claire, ninety-three. * Nine months of illness,a year away from Beirut,of timor mortis at six on summer morningsawake in sweat-crumpled sheets. Now with departure,a duffel bag of troubleon your mind again, you sort out the books and clothes,throw the unused pills away. [End Page 37] *Used clothes and used books,past years packed in shopping bagsfor charity shops to diminish the clutter,to make room for the clutter of too many booksjust bought, and clothes from the soldesas if you had space, as if your years could expandinto numberless chapters. * Meaningless numbers,a birth year, death year, an age,the months of mourning. Her engravings on the wall,her book, and hers, near my bed. There is nothing inthe buzz of ginger or wineto pry tomorrow out of the sunlight’s hollowone-sided conversation. * Conversation ina room, the rain, on a pathgoing anywhere [End Page 38] and nowhere, and where would yourather be? Gnarled apple trees, hydrangea bushesmoon-green in late afternoon,an old man with keys to his allotment gardenand a bag of lettuces. * Dropped the laundry bagoff where they remember mefrom a year ago. Squeezing my pomegranatejuice, the portly grizzled man asked: Don’t we know you?Yes, I was here last spring andtwo years before that. Women, the same ones or not,are begging on Hamra Street. * Hamra Street perfume:sizzling man’ouche, red diesel,late-day narguilehs. In one café two beardedmen my age write in notebooks. I’m not at home, I’mnot homesick, not sure of myfooting and language. [End Page 39] I could learn Spanish in French.Learn ‘amiyeh in fus’ha? * If I order itin fus’ha, the waitress smiles,brings my glass of wine, understanding how much Ientirely don’t understand. So much forgottenof noun roots, branches of verbsI scratched in notebooks for weekly hours when nothingor everything could go wrong. * “Old’s” the wrong gender,like being the only girlon a team of boys, wrong race; the one black orbrown student in a white class, entirely aloneif there’s a problem and you’rein over your head or too reticent to askin your old lady wolf suit. * [End Page 40] Wolf of solitude,oud in late October wind,wolf words at wolf-hour. Is there a revolutionnot routed or turned riot? Too tired or too late,in always the wrong language,but I’d howl in it intuiting what he meant,not repeating what she...

Memory of a father

Memory of a father Samira Negrouche (bio) Translated from the French (Algeria) by Marilyn Hacker For Djamal AmraniPassive as a bird who seesall, in his flight, and keeps in his heartwhile he flies through the sky the consciousnessthat does not forgivepier paolo pasolini: Poesia en forma di rosa A memory of a fatherlives in my deep solitudesRimbaud's solitudesand his rotting legamputatedat conception * legs and basementsrottento finish off poets likethe soul of Jean Sénacwho don't stophaunting me * must make do with thatbe born with thatand sperm spilled [End Page 9] into wombsas fast as possibledischarged into the bodyand the shadows * a knee places itselfgently on the fold of lifethen all of the head and the bodytake shapein the imperfect curveof that leopard manat the start of the raceand they take off to caressthe horizon * it's a wanderingsoulin search of memorysolitary, forgetfulintending to washin torrents of rainand blood * memory of your backimpotent, arthriticand the lead weightsnever entirelydetached from it * [End Page 10] you still bow downin front of heavyblack shoes you bow down before your own legs in short pants fleeing the furious violent schoolmaster * still you bow downbefore your mother's mountains, the Djurdjuraand your tears of mourningthe ones hidden behindclosed, dirty windowpanesfarewells one does not want toutterthat one never knows how topronouncethat you go ontearingfrom the genealogyof my words [End Page 11] Samira Negrouche Samira Negrouche was born in 1980 in Algiers where she still lives. She is a poet and translator and also a doctor, who has privileged her literary projects for several years. She has frequently collaborated with visual artists and musicians, including the violinist Marianne Pikety, the theorbist Bruno Helstroffer, and the graphic artist Ali Silem. Her books include A l'ombre de Grenade, Le Jazz des oliviers, and Six arbres de fortune autour de ma baignoire. Poems of hers, in Marilyn Hacker's translation, have appeared in journals including Banipal, Pleiades, upstreet and PN Review. Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger's Mirror (Norton) and Names (Norton), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan). Her translations from the French include Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux), which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Emmanuel Moses's Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin). For her own work, she received the PEN Voelcker Award for poetry. She lives in Paris. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Between Two Cells

Between Two Cells Yasser Khanjer (bio) Translated from the Arabic (Syria) by Marilyn Hacker For Mazen Darwish, and all the prisoners of the Syrian regime I hear your voice light up the next celland the question occurs to meWhere does the guard change his clotheswhen he goes from your cell to mine?How does he shift the letters on his lipswithout one of the two "enemy" languages breaking—a language in despair since its creation,gloomy since infancy, lameobliquedeceitfulthat manages, once it's beautified itselfto trap its neighbor, enthralledin undoing the good-luck charms of its childhood—a language with malleable meaningsengrossed by the charms of exegesis,barefoot, like a dancer bent backward,her anklets linking the text's footto the sultan's desire.How does he change the letters on his lips,a guard who pronounces words badlywhen he goes from my cell to yours? * Are you smoking?Reach your hand out between the bars [End Page 12] I'll light your cigarette for you,the last one in the packInhale its smoke in secretso the guard doesn't take it away.The light here is dim,no star knows this wounded horizon.Draw up a little sunlight from your heart,it will gouge out the eye of darkness * The guard's face here, root of a chronic deathand mirror of a massacre there.The guard's face there, bloody with defeatshe only describes in secret.Since he hasn't learned the role of victimhe dresses in his wolf costumeto hunt down a letter in a poem and riddle it with wounds.The guard's face there,memory of a surrender heavy with stories * To the guards here and there, a weakness like dry grassif each one wasn't leaning on a riflethat stands guard over the dunes of his fear,a confession throbbing in a song.And if they exchange a few insultsthe aim is clear,they are only juggling masks.They are a pair of twins,they have one umbilical cord,there where their shadow fell on the eartha slaughter follows a slaughter. * [End Page 13] hear your voice, the brushing of pine needlesas it climbs the steps of prayerthen exhales the perfectly baked bread of freedomtoward a heart open to the winds To the prisoners here and those therea single heartthat gets drunk on a breath of freedom * I have comrades in prisonwho turn each night, penitent, toward pillows of hopeHunger devours themThirst withers themyet they persist in adorning the hip of our shattered agewith a flock of freed birds [End Page 14] Yasser Khanjer Yasser Khanjer was born in 1977 in the occupied Golan Heights. He spent seven years of his twenties in prison for resisting the Israeli occupation. His first collection of poems, Freedom Bird, was published in Beirut during his imprisonment; two others followed, and a fourth book It Is Not Midway, is forthcoming from Al-Mutawassit Publications in Milan. A bilingual Arabic/English collection, Wounds of the Cloud, was published in al-Quds/Jerusalem this year. Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger's Mirror (Norton) and Names (Norton), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan). Her translations from the French include Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux), which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Emmanuel Moses's Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin). For her own work, she received the PEN Voelcker Award for poetry. She lives in Paris. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Calligraphies V

Calligraphies V Marilyn Hacker (bio) Late fall, near midnight,walking home alone from aloquacious dinner, I saw, heard, cop cars, sirens,thought: There's a big fire somewhere. Japanese touristsdescend from buses now, takeattack-site selfies. Illegal demonstrations.Terrorism: déjà vu. * Déjà vu, hard rainafter unseasonableblue bright mornings. You Google whom you once loved:wedding photo at fifty, face, body, thickened,shrunk, out of your fantasies.And what would you say [End Page 15] who said so much once overthose neutral restaurant tables? * Winter's not neutral:damp infiltrates bronchialpassages. You've coughed since that Burgundy Christmaspneumonia, twenty years past. But light's coming back.But a medical studentblew himself up in a square in Sultanahmetwhere you've been a tourist too. * She's been arguing,she's fed up with rhetoric,easy amalgams. You dip bread in olive oil,then dip it in the za'atar. Back from Geneva,with comrades at peace talks thataren't going to happen — You proofread her news-brief, seehow her frayed shirt is ripping. * [End Page 16] Attention frayingin late afternoon light, soonday will be done, not the work incumbent on it— whatever that might have been– Gnarls of an old textin the other alphabet:can I unknot them, reweave a mirror fabricof the unraveled phrases? * A day unravelsthat she, he, they spent waitingin line in rain in administrative limboor the emergency room. Are you immigrantsor political exilesor refugees? Words with different valences insubliminal translation. * Liminal space whereexiles with dictionarieslose themselves: barzakh, [End Page 17] Arabic isthmus, the spanfrom death to resurrection in Farsi: limbo,where Socrates murmurs tounbaptized babies in contrapuntal cognatesthey hear fardous, paradise. * Infantile, senile,when I read out loud I stop,stammer and stutter then pronounce everything wrong.An illiterate lover worse than the peasantaccents of emigrants whoreturn years later to the villages where theirmothers did not learn to read. * My mother would readto me- fables, fairy tales—until the day I said I could read them myself,and I did. I was three. [End Page 18] My mother would readmy notebooks, search desk drawerswhile I was at school. I had to tear up and flushmy revolts down the toilet. * Down the rain-splashed street,try not to keep your eyes downwhile the sky weighs down on the wrong side of winter.You don't forget you aren't young. Still, there's arrival—the desposeidos' priestmakes time for welcome, more liminal narrativesover midnight bacalão. [End Page 19] Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger's Mirror (Norton) and Names (Norton), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan). Her translations from the French include Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux), which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Emmanuel Moses's Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin). For her own work, she received the PEN Voelcker Award for poetry. She lives in Paris. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press

Psalm, and: Variations

Psalm, and: Variations Jean-Paul de Dadelsen (bio) Translated by Marilyn Hacker (bio) Psalm The whale, says Jonah, is war and its black-outs.The whale is the city and its deep wells and its barracks.The whale is the country stuck in its mud and its one grocery and the pulled punches and the unwashed crotches and the money.The whale is society, and its taboos, its vanity, its ignorance.The whale is (in so many cases, my brothers, my sisters) marriage.The whale is self-love. And still other things that I’ll tell youLater, when you are a bit less obtuse (after page x).The whale is incarnate life.The whale is creation, superfluous after all is said and done, but indispensable for that gratuitous and after all almost incomprehensible experiment.The whale is always farther, vaster; believe me, you barely escape, you have a hard time escaping from the whale.The whale is necessary. And don’t think that you’ll understand everything all in one go. Because after all, Of course war is a bloody bore Of course society Of course marriage But we haven’t yet found a better way So that in the end In the last analysis, all that’s left as the source of bloody boredom Is self-love. For you must know, looking within or without (As I did when the whale opened its jaws—or through me). That precisely: war, Society, marriage… there are those Who make use of them As a springboard to leap beyond themselves… [End Page 4] Variations on a theme of Baudelaire« Mon enfant, ma soeur » 1 Unknown one, as if I had begotten you with a foreign woman,I can understand you, though, as if we came from the same womb.Against my neck your younger heartMarks a newer hour than mine, o confidentEnemy and sweet accomplice all at once, listenTo our linked bloodstreams filling with the same murmur that risesFrom the depths of our natal night. 2 Beyond the years where you did not come to join me, beyondThe useless totems’ defenses, so much newer than we are,I find you again.I should be able to smile at you at last and take your handTo lead you to the spouse from another tribe. O dangerous and secret one,I recognize your sullen, patient look that wordlessly reminds meOur thirst is not quenched. 3 Who will prove to me, silent one, that you are telling the truth? I doNot know you, Madam, and do not have what would satisfy you.Go back to your husband!I am not what you think. We are deceiving each other, lovely lady!This is a treacherous season, when everything labours hidden in the earth.But say something! speak! to refute at last the implacableCertainty of your silence. [End Page 5] 4 The temples were new. We watched out for the columns’ fresh paint.This wasn’t our first life.When I came back caked with the blood of our brothers, of our enemies,You began to heat up a basin of pure water.(Some of them were our brothers and in fact our enemies, and some,Foreigners, nonetheless our allies.)In the firelight, I watched your narrow hands wash my slashed legs. Later, you went aloneAfter your last night as a girlchild, to throw into the flames,On the altar of the impassive goddessThe innocent linen stained by the first blood that separated us for life.You followed meWith what was already a woman’s gaze when I left under the olive trees,When I went back to war. 5 Where, in truth, might we depart together? The poets ramble on.The braggart poets always forget the animals bleating in the barn,The wheat rising, the hungry children,The trees to be grafted, the rooftiles laid, after the squall.We have always been the ones who fed the fire and kept the feast-days.As long as I’ve known you, we have always had to wait, then depart,In different directions, on the last night. 6 There was a time when it was...

Six Poems

WORLDLIT.ORG 23 moments capturing convergence in divergence, the dance of the “contraries,” bringing together science and art, politics and spirituality, geography and history, East and West, led me to explore cosmopolitanism at the root of the ghazal form. Cosmopolitanism is defined in the dictionary as “being free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments; at home all over the world”; it is necessarily an active appreciation of disparate entities , a rejection of narrow constructs of identities, in fact, a rejection of all strictures; it is an ownership as well as a divestment. It celebrates pluralism as fiercely as it forges an autonomous voice. The ghazal, in its structure as well as its sensibility, not only allows contraries to cohabit but, in the best compositions, makes a demand to frame polarity in the same space. Once the matla, the opening couplet, introduces the refrain (or radif), the reader expects two things: one, that each successive couplet will be locked in by the same phrase/word/image of the radif, and two, that a wild freedom of perspective will be offered like a new puzzle piece that astonishes by fitting the given radif as perfectly as the previous one. The two scenes above provide a launching point for this discussion on the ghazal’s cosmopolitanism because I see the concerns of the classical ghazal enacted in them. And ghazal is nothing if not performative, a collaboration of sorts with the mushai’ra audience: another facet of its cosmopolitanism. Azra Raza, director of the MDS Center at Columbia University and coauthor of Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, appears to me to enact the ghazal by paying tribute to both Einstein and Ghalib, two great people from different parts of the world, engaged in radically different enterprises , who would have completely understood each other’s urgent desire to reach an unnervingly elegant question through boldly exercising the imagination, who were not only unafraid of polarities but found meaning in placing polarities in close proximity to each other. Marilyn Hacker, long and deeply invested in a poetics of challenging dichotomies, appears to do the same by combining diverse gestures, merely out of habit; volume after volume of her poetry and translations , from earlier works to the more recent Names and Diaspo/Renga (co-authored with the Palestinian American poet Deema Shehabi), offer us insights into how to grow a robust, original thought in the thinnest cracks of established order. The ghazal registers order, follows it, and revels in agitating it—a kind of duende in its genetic code. Six Poems by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Qasida of the Bridge of Teacups The soul cleaves into two somewhere along the birth canal, didn’t you say, Plato? I send your echo back to Athens from my rug of locked antlers in Peshawar where I fill a teacup with the question of half my soul (as I watercolor a whitewashed village I’ve yet to see). In the torpor of the mango season, I am closer to the heady basil that fishermen of the Black Sea put in their boats for luck – Will I know my soul by the musk of tannin ink, sugarcane pulp, sweat of a calligrapher’s palm? The antlers are fading. From teacups of clay, bison bone, crystal, bamboo, I build a bridge to the other half. Qasida of Tea, the Daughter of Remorse Sit, I am your powdered throne, so says dust, let my busy worm-teeth suture your folly, let remorse float in your bowl as a tea leaf, let it dissolve your delusions. Hear the wood-fire-crackle of stubborn bones under the golden whisper of tea? The emperor, an outcast, bows to his only brother – the bowl, drinking water bewitched by jasmine: a slow brew coloring realization a hint from the wind to the outcast’s hill Qasida of the Fifty-foot Tea Bush The poet’s divan, his only piece of furniture, pushed against the ecstasy of the window, bears the weight of his longing for the beloved to appear. Ah Fanny! Even a tea bush in Assam knows his secret, has shot up to a bewildering height throwing a gentle shade over the flame of his...

Calligraphies: IV

Calligraphies:IV Marilyn Hacker (bio) Eight in the morning.The old woman down the hallis playing Fairouz. Gray rain stains these slanted roofs.Beirut smothers in sandstorms. The drunkard imploreshis neighbor’s pretty daughternot to forget him in the grand old woman’s song.Down the hall, she sings along. A hall of closed doorslocked on possibilities,a hall of mirrors, each reflection is grotesque.Frontiers are rediscovered and fenced with barbed wire.My grandfather’s language andthe one I plug at shouted at each other, un-comprehending. Mirrors, doors. [End Page 467] The morning mirroris a window on the rain—early October like winter in this city.At the desk in pajamas, sorry for yourself,with dictionary opento hopeless desires, you write a word, close your eyes,hear footsteps diminishing. Diminishing light—still dark at six, six-thirty,beige gauze blinds down. The café has its lights onas it did five hours ago. Read for half an hourin bed, or grab a sweater,run a bath with foam, then coffee, newspapers wheredaily the darkness augments. My bald friend augmentsthe ages of all womenhis age or older, writers, teachers, his colleagues.“She must be at least eighty.” “No, she’s sixty-eightif that makes any difference.”“No, she’s not sixty, [End Page 468] she’s fifty-four, like you are.”(And his girlfriend’s twenty-two.) Two surtitle screens,English and French. The actorsact in Arabic: the sack of Ur; scribes, tablets,the scholar martyr who read and translated them.Rasha knows half the actors,slips back toward real life amidst gongs, lamentations,murdered words resurrected. Resurrected day—July’s late afternoon walksto reconsider the unfinished, unstarted,all the way to the canal. Three more hours of light:you could start, you could finish . . .That was then. Now dusk deepens before seven, andlate afternoon becomes night. Bright fall afternoonto walk to the Mairie witha sack of towels, shirts, three backpacks, for the bin—collection for refugees. [End Page 469] You wouldn’t offeryour friends two-year-old cashmeres.In cafés, they won’t let you pick up the bill, andsay “Next year in Damascus . . .” At this time of yearnew classes take their form forteacher and student, proofs to read for Spring issueswhile mailing the just-printed Fall. I emigrated,mark the seasons without awork permit. So I’m a student again, translatethree ways, begin forever. Whoever you were,I’ll get used to your absence.Dinner companion of a decade and a half,her wit silenced at ninety; loves of my life whodecided otherwise, nowsomething else, or gone . . . yesterday’s brown eyes or green,yesterday’s future now past. [End Page 470] Now, figs in salad,cut up, or figs in labne,green Italian figs, and blue-black Provençal figsfrom the three brothers’ fruit-stand. Remember figuiers’branches overhanging stonewalls, or the time we climbed a ladder to the roofand picked the late figs of Vence. Vence in September:on the terrace with Marie,we heard the ravine murmur its prelude and fugueto our reticent breakfasts— coffee, bread and jam.She was fifty-nine, and Iwas thirty-seven, that is, almost the same ageas we turned to our day’s work. A sonnet turns fromaffirmation to question,landscape to closeup, a routine doctor’s visitfrom a chore to a verdict. The week-old child turnsin her safe wooden cradleon a Kurdish rug where a stork feather weaves itsdistant song through her morning. [End Page 471] Marilyn Hacker MARILYN HACKER is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), Names (Norton, 2010), and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003), an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010), and fourteen collections of translations of French and Francophone poets including Emmanuel Moses, Marie Etienne, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Habib Tengour and Rachida Madani. DiaspoRenga, a collaborative sequence written with Deema Shehabi, was published by Holland Park Press in 2014. She lives in Paris. Copyright © 2016 Marilyn Hacker

Doing It Together, The Gay Way: Queer Coupling in Marilyn Hacker’s Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons and Carl Phillips’s Cortège

This article explores the poetry of Marilyn Hacker and Carl Phillips by drawing attention to the poems' representations of same-sex couples living in domestic space via two basic strategies. First, the article examines how Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons dramatizes the performative work of "doing coupledom” as opposed to depicting same-sex lovers intent upon inclusion within the normative frame of marriage. The second approach the article takes is to examine the ways that Phillips's Cortège describes intimate, often unflattering, love narratives that reveal a queer sensitivity to the subject of joy/pain/desire, reflective of the degree to which queers are forced to meditate on such topics as why, how, and whom one can desire. Phillips seeks to describe a queer sensitivity, an alertness and aliveness to social and sexual relations implicit in many queer discourses on the subject of love. In their respective poetics, Love, Death and Cortège contemplate ordinary domestic space as a site of performative processing of partnered relationships, and they recommend queer living and loving practices sensitive to the complexities of joy/pain/desire.

Where Are the Trees Going?

Mohsin Hamid. Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London. New York. Riverhead Books / Penguin. 2015. isbn 9781594633652 Mohsin Hamid, novelist and essayist, has lived in Pakistan, England, and the United States, cultivating a tension over identity that pervades his essay collection Discontent and Its Civilizations. The collection’s essays span from 2000—pulsing on the cusp of the attacks of 9/11—to 2014, offering the perspective of a new father who has returned to Pakistan to raise his daughter. The book’s sections—“Life,” “Art,” and “Politics”—offer succinct, previously published essays, which Hamid uses to express his urgent concern for the world. The most recent essays focus on Pakistan, where his daughter will grow and learn. In the title essay, Hamid discusses covering her window with blast-resistant film; he worries that his desire to protect her “will dim my daughter’s view” of a favorite “yellow-blooming amaltas tree.” The desire to protect without sheltering permeates the collection, for Hamid loves and is repelled by much of what he sees happening in life, art, and politics over the course of the first decade of the new millennium. Choosing along with his partner to return to Pakistan to participate in that country’s reimagining, Hamid summarizes in “Personal and Political Intertwined” the experience of many of the essays: “Things in the country around me these past few years have been mixed. Much is horrible, much is beautiful, and much is in between.” His ability to see all sides of the story makes reading the essays feel like having a conversation with a partner, a person who wants to convince the reader there is much at stake, that a world needs literature even more when there are drones flying overhead, that one needs to look at the majestic tree through a window shadowed by blast-resistant film. Hamid admits in “My Foreign Correspondence ” that he is inventing himself, his argument, and his understanding of nationhood as he goes along. He lays bare his complicated quest for identity—in religion , nationality, even parental status—to convey the necessity for change resulting in global stability. He lives in a country tensed with the threat of violence: “America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24/7/365.” His hope for Pakistan, the world, and his daughter in the face of terrible events is the nerve center of this fine collection. Colleen Lutz Clemens Kutztown University Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Where Are the Trees Going? Marilyn Hacker, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2014. isbn 9780810130081 Born in Lebanon, Vénus Khoury-Ghata has lived in France since 1972. She has published forty books of novels, poetry, and translations, which earned her the 2011 Goncourt Prize for her entire body of work. Four volumes of poems have appeared in English since 2000 thanks to talented fellow poet and translator Marilyn Hacker. Where Are the Trees Going? was crowned in its French version by the 2013 Pierrette Micheloud Poetry Prize. The English version contains selections from two prose volumes; several of its poems have appeared in print and online in British, Lebanese, and American literary magazines, sometimes in different versions. The prose excerpts constitute a canvas that helps organize the poems into polyphonic threads. Khoury-Ghata’s rhythms are part lullaby and part incantation: “If one moth left the lamp the evening turned to night / The mother put us to bed head-to-foot with trees the same age as ourselves.” Objects, trees, humans, wind, or water perform Leo Tolstoy Strider: The Story of a Horse Louise Maude & Aylmer Maude, tr. Borderland Books Famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrestles with questions of aging and mortality in this lesser-known novel. Told largely from the viewpoint of an old horse recounting his story and his owner’s as they go through life and experience decline, Tolstoy’s sharp prose pierces to the heart of humanity and shows us our true selves. Survivors: Hungarian Jewish Poets of the Holocaust Thomas Ország-Land, ed. & tr. Smokestack Books Out of one of the greatest historical tragedies of the twentieth century comes this anthology of poetry written by sufferers of the Holocaust...

One Where the Kid Actually is “All Right”: The Queering of Iva in Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons

This article explores Marilyn Hacker's 1986 sonnet sequence, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, for its depiction of lesbian parenting. Hacker moves beyond the simply erotic to focus on a truly subversive act present within the queer community, namely that of child-rearing. Lesbian parenting is a private world, one not subject to the male gaze in the ways that other seemingly private worlds (like sex) are still commodified. The daughter character of Iva exemplifies the construction of self in a queer environment. Children of queer parents have the unique subject position of being “queered” themselves regardless of their ultimate sexual orientation. While this queering would seem to primarily affect their understandings of gender and sexuality, this article argues that such early “othering” serves to deconstruct one's understanding of binaries and social conformity on a large scale, thereby encouraging qualities of acceptance and compassion and increasing the intimate family bond.

The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Sudeep Sen, ed.

Rachida Madani Tales of a Severed Head Marilyn Hacker, tr. Yale University Press Political activist Rachida Madani analyzes the societal roles of women in her modern verse adaptation of the classic tale, The Thousand and One Nights. She examines these contemporary issues as an act of resistance, believing writing has the power to bring understanding and reconciliation. Jeff Lemire The Underwater Welder Top Shelf Productions Jack Joseph seems stuck in a nightmare that keeps re-creating his father’s drowning off the coast of Nova Scotia. When his wife goes into labor, it’s time for Jack to wake up. Known for his award-winning Essex County trilogy, Canadian Jeff Lemire has created another profound combination of art and story in The Underwater Welder. Nota Bene chus, all evoked in modern idiom. Poems from this group, such as “Telemachus’s Kindness,” can bring youth’s brutally explicit assessments of family behavior—“I had no father; my mother / lived at her loom hypothesizing / her husband’s erotic life”—into balance with the more compassionate perceptions of maturity: “as a grown man / I can look at my parents / impartially and pity them both.” Later collections feature some formal innovations, though the tone remains unsentimentally austere. In Vita Nova, Glück introduces the haunting format of the interview; the subject in “The Burning Heart” is Dante’s Francesca, whose responses to the interviewer’s pitilessly direct questions (“Ask her if the fire hurts”) are delicately evasive and oblique: “. . . gradually I understood / that though neither of us ever moved / we were not together but profoundly separate .” In The Seven Ages, Glück gracefully lengthens her line and uncharacteristically unifies poems like “The Sensual World” and “Arboretum” with central metaphors. Her final and most recent collection, A Village Life (see WLT, July 2010, 74), is a cycle of poetic narratives about the communal life of a Mediterranean village that suggests the influence of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese’s Lavorare Stanca in its simplicity of language and the hypnotic force with which it mythologizes human relationships in poems like “Marriage”: “He never uses words. Words, for him, are for making arrangements, / for doing business. Never for anger, never for tenderness.” Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry. Sudeep Sen, ed. New Delhi. HarperCollins India. 2012. isbn 9789350290415 With the exception of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (2010), which focuses on poets born or residing in the United States, this is the first major anthology of Indian poetry in English since Jeet Thayil’s Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) expanded the canon by presenting over seventy poets spanning three generations. The current selection grew out of two “Indian Poetry” issues Sudeep Sen edited for The Literary Review in 2009 and for The Yellow Nib Modern English Poetry by Indians in 2011. Like these, but in more definite and far-reaching terms, the HarperCollins book departs from previous anthologies in a couple of important ways. One is the decision to omit entirely the older generation (i.e., Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Moraes, Jussawalla , Mehrotra, Patel, et al.) and concentrate instead on poets born between the early 1950s and the late 1980s, the declared start date being 1950, the year in which India became a republic. Such a shift forward in time makes this the first book-length anthology of Indian poetry in which women outnumber men (by fortynine to thirty-six) and poets born or living abroad outnumber those based in India (by forty-six to thirty-nine). Demographics aside, the mere juxtaposition of older and younger poets (with some of the former mentored by foundational figures such as Ezekiel or Moraes, and many of the latter forged in American academia) may– june 2013 • 69 reviews makes it futile to look for common thematic or stylistic patterns. As noted in the foreword, “The range of style, preoccupation, technique is vast, various and impressive.” For most poets, the only common denominator may be traced to their more or less definite Indian roots—a rather tenuous link, considered the subcontinent’s linguistic and cultural diversity, and one which may be mediated or superseded by more recent—and diverse—cultural layers...

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here

72 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews “My life was formed by keen distractions designed to control / my body’s great awakening, which brought to bloom / the passion upon which I had wagered my soul” (“The Elastic Cord”). Published by Wigestrand in a bilingual edition, An Elastic State of Mind makes Powell a full-fledged American Norwegian poet who has been translated in six languages and has translated eleven books into Norwegian. With this, her fifth poetic volume, Powell has reached new maturity and new depth and has produced an innovative and sensitive tribute to an extraordinary woman. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin miscellaneous Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. Beau Beausoleil & Deema K. Shehabi, ed. Oakland, California. PM Press. 2012. isbn 9781604865905 Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad is a winding street about one thousand feet long, noted for its many bookstores and outdoor book stalls. Named after the famous classical Arab poet Abu at-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi (915–965 ce), it has been a thriving center of Baghdad ’s bookselling and publishing for many years. On March 5, 2007, a car bomb was exploded on it, perhaps to intimidate intellectuals. More than thirty people were killed, and more than one hundred were wounded—booksellers, book buyers , and devotees of reading and of books—and the Shabandar Café where intellectuals met was gutted. Beau Beausoleil, a poet and San Francisco bookseller, created in solidarity a coalition of poets, artists, writers, printers, booksellers, and readers; broadsides of their writings and artwork about this tragic event were printed, and recitations were made in many cities. With Deema K. Shehabi, another San Francisco poet, an anthology of 135 pieces in prose and verse has now been compiled in this book, including some translated from Arabic and French and the texts of some broadsides (see WLT, May 2012, 34–37). Thepiecesareofdifferentlengths and moods. Some describe the street and decry the horrible event, others commemorate the innocent victims, and others still exult defiantly in the eventual triumph of freedom and truth: “You can bomb a bookstore or ban / a book, but it will not die. You cannot kill / a poem like you can a man. / Al-Mutanabbi Street will rise again” (Sam Hamill). “The books blew up and people, / cafés and stores; but words remained, / hovering, circled, waiting” (George Evans). The anthology begins with an impressive five-page essay by Anthony Shadid, originally published in the Washington Post on March 12, 2007. Born in Oklahoma City in 1968, Shadid died on February 16, 2012, while covering the current Syrian revolution. His essay is a heartfelt story of Mohammed Hayawi , an Iraqi bookseller who died on Al-Mutanabbi Street and whom he knew while he was the Baghdad bureau chief of the newspaper. A similar personal essay is by Maysoon Pachachi, a London-based filmmaker of Iraqi origin, who reminisces about a 2004 visit to Baghdad for the first time in thirty-five years and remembers Al-Mutanabbi Street and Shabandar Café and other experiences. She ends by saying, “And sometimes it seems like the rhythm of Iraqi history is one of destruction, lament, and repair.” In fact, Al-Mutanabbi Street has reopened, and Shabandar Café has been renovated, although its owner lost many family members in the murderous blast. Among other contributions, there is one by Adrienne Rich (1929– 2012) entitled “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” another by the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926– 64)—his famous “Rain Song”—and another by Marilyn Hacker entitled “Ghazal: Dar al-Harb,” critical of the United States: “I might wish, like any citizen, to celebrate my country / but millions have reason to fear and hate my country.” This anthology is recommended, not only for its literary merits, but also for its testimony. Issa J. Boullata Montréal ...