Calligraphies

March 15, 2023
Poetic form is Hacker's defense against chaos. Armed with the rigor of the ghazal and the pantoum, she channels the sorrows of war and terror, displacement and exile. Mixing the personal with the global, Hacker is especially adept here in her incantatory use of repetition. A New Yorker who has long lived in Paris and a poet with nearly 20 collections and many major awards, Hacker is also an accomplished translator, whirling among French, Arabic, and English linguistically and culturally, taking particular pleasure in the culinary. She is funny and scathing in her observations about age and the wretched "administrative limbo" that traps refugees, political exiles, and immigrants and offers gorgeous homages to poet Marie Ponsot and Syrian actress and activist Fadwa Suleiman. Hacker joined forces with poet Karthika Na�r in A Different Distance (2021) to share experiences of the COVID-19 lockdown. The pandemic and its cascading implications also shapes this volume's lush series, "Montpeyroux Sonnets," in which she contrasts life's abundance in the French countryside with paltry interactions with other masked humans. Hacker is adept, witty, poignant, profound, and mesmerizing.

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Starred review from April 1, 2023

Following Blazons, the multi-award-winning Hacker examines love, war, resistance, literature, memories, and aging, but what she does best is capture the everyday: the tastes and smells of food, coffee, and wine, and, most importantly, the clashes of languages and cultures, particularly in Beirut, Paris, and the French village of Montpeyroux. Even as she captures the fear and stasis of pandemic, her empathetic questioning of what makes a good life brings these poems to a deeper level. "History trundled// beneath, gravel on a barge,/ ground down to its origins," she says at one point and, as she contemplates loss and loneliness, "My feet/ have lost the memory of roads that run/ from town to hamlet, from Belleville to Saint-/ Denis." Throughout, Hacker uses multiple forms, from the ghazal to the sonnet, and the repetition of words and phrases brings music and emotional depth to many of the poems. VERDICT Occasionally, a phrase brushes improbability ("My horse and my notebook think// what I am thinking/ through an orgy of cadence"), but these poems breathe with life; even in a collection this large, the reader stays involved. "On the road,/ cars rarify, whisk by trees that explode/ in redbud, apple blossom, presage fruit": a poetic journey not to be missed.--Doris Jean Lynch

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Starred review from April 17, 2023
These formally ambitious and energetic poems by Hacker (A Different Distance) feature a progression of sonnet crowns, ghazals, sapphics, pantoums, and linked haiku that carry the reader through a litany of maladies. These include the pandemic, political and personal pains (“the desiccated nerves of lost desires”), the plight of refugees, the difficulty of learning Arabic, and the loneliness of quarantine. Each stanza picks up a thread from the last, the dismal emotional weather relieved by the pleasures of a good wine, an open-air market, or a veal chop. Hacker calls out nonsense as she sees it: “‘To write a sonnet is a fascist act’—/ Suggest that to the next tyre-burning goon this winter!” But she is equally hard on herself, as in the witty and perfect ghazal she calls “Myself.” She dedicates poems to Karthika Nair, a French Indian poet, and Fadwa Suleiman, the late Syrian actor and civil war activist—two among the many people Hacker has worked with in Paris and elsewhere. These varied and powerful poems highlight the healing that resides in poetic collaboration and friendship across borders.