About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen volumes of poems. Her honors include the National Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She lives in Paris.

Reviews

"Through the terrors of death, history, pain, and love, Marilyn Hacker's mind moves like a laser beam. These poems are among the most incisive pieces of writing we have. As for the writing, the poetry, it is brilliant." -- Hayden Carruth "Winter Numbers is Hacker at the top of her form, bending rhyme and meter to her uses, dazzling us with her formalist prowess and breaking our hearts with her impassioned narrative." -- Maxine Kumin "Winter Numbers is her strongest book to date." -- Grace Shulman - The Nation

"Through the terrors of death, history, pain, and love, Marilyn Hacker's mind moves like a laser beam. These poems are among the most incisive pieces of writing we have. As for the writing, the poetry, it is brilliant." -- Hayden Carruth "Winter Numbers is Hacker at the top of her form, bending rhyme and meter to her uses, dazzling us with her formalist prowess and breaking our hearts with her impassioned narrative." -- Maxine Kumin "Winter Numbers is her strongest book to date." -- Grace Shulman - The Nation

Listen to a poet's query: ``Who dies well?'' In her seventh book, Hacker considers the too-familiar deaths of her friends from cancer and AIDS, and those of her friends' children (``morose, unanswerable, the list/ of thirty-and forty-year-old suicides''), remembering that ``no one was promised a shapely life/ ending in a tutelary vision.'' When breast cancer menaces her, she records her losses: ``Should I tattoo my scar?'' Hacker's ironic wisdom is achieved in such writing. But death is everywhere: the poet looks backward to the genocide of World War II and abroad to Bosnia and El Salvador to draw parallels between cancer of the flesh and this century's political horrors: ``My self-betraying body needs to grieve/at how hatreds metastasize.'' In her longer and best poems, she protests death, as in ``Against Elegies,'' or bears witness to blighting disease in ``Cancer Winter.'' A flurry of highly stylized poems-whimsical but slight-in this brief collection provide relief but fade beside the major. Dark as her subject is, Hacker's poems illuminate: ``All I can know is the expanding moment,/ present, infinitesimal, infinite.'' (Oct.)