Marie Etienne's poetry is inspired by the synthesis of the contemporary and the classical, the tragic and the mundane--the quotidian transformed by the tragic prisms of myth and history. Through a profound and complex reinterpretation of the sonnet form, the book reflects, as in a mosaic of shattered mirrors, many of the writer's ongoing preoccupations: the relationship of East and West; an eroticism at once physical and cerebral; the interaction of poetry and prose; the strange blending of the everyday and the foreign, in which the most "exotic" journeys become ordinary and the most...

Praise for Marilyn Hacker:

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

"Hacker is one of our best singers---by turns elegiac and fierce, sweet and witty. With each new collection her...

from "Ghazal: The Beloved" Lines that grapple doubt, written because of the beloved: when grief subsides, what survives the loss of the beloved Your every declaration is suspect That was, at least, the departing gloss of the beloved Were you merely a servant of the stat or (now you give the coin a toss) of the beloved How pure you were, resistant in an orchard Peace with justice: the cause of the beloved.

Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker's generous selections in A Stranger's Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp.

In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafes, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations, and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal...

Longlist finalist, 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Where Are the Trees Going? brings together some of the latest work of the poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata in a manner that showcases her central concerns in a wholly novel and provocative format. Renowned translator Marilyn Hacker interleaves a full translation of Khoury-Ghata's volume of poetry Ou vont les arbres.with prose from La maison aux orties. The resulting interplay illuminates the poet's contrasting and complementary drives toward surreal lyricism and stark narrative...

Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker's generous selections in A Stranger's Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp.

In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafes, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations, and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal...