A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems, 1994–2013

Multiaward winner Hacker (Names; Desesperanto) continues to write with an unflinching clarity. "The body [of her work] is a festival," notes the introduction, a feast of form and feminism, a banquet of the political and politic. In her latest volume, she brings readers generous selections from four previous collections, as well as translations and 25 new poems that range in location from the Middle East to the bedroom. Hacker writes in multiple forms, in crowns of sonnets, sestinas, ghazals, and rengas, mirroring the world's terrors while exploring the poet's relationships to and relevance in these worlds. Her poems leave "all the parentheses filled," using a language that is often intimate and always verbally dexterous, painstakingly musical, and formal and colloquial at the same time. Though composed in the voice of another, these lines could describe Hacker's life as a poet: "I live in my own house now. In my line of vision,/ an almond tree flowers. I live by words,/ .and on each page I write a letter to my brothers."