Winter Numbers: Poems [Hardcover]

Marilyn Hacker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1994

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In her seventh volume Marilyn Hacker confronts life and death at the end of our genocidal century, making another extraordinary contribution to the feminist and lesbian canon.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Marilyn Hacker's Winter Numbers is a meditation on death, a collection of painful poems in the wake of losing loved ones to AIDS and cancer. The numbers referred to here are the metronomic beats of passing time, the mile markers on life's journey, the months remaining in a doctor's grim prognosis. The only solace is in connection, as Hacker writes in Year's End: "Underneath the numbers, how lives are braided." Highly recommended for the mortal.

From Publishers Weekly

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."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 95 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (June 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039303674X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393036749
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,863,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names (Norton, 2009) Essays on Departure (Carcanet Press, UK, 2006)and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003). Her ten volumes of translations from the French include Emmanuel Moses' He and I (Oberlin College Press, 2009), Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2008) which received the 2009 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Nettles (The Graywolf Press, 2008). She lives in New York and Paris andteaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the City College of New York. She is a past recipient of the Lenore Marshall Award, the Poets' Prize, the National Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.