About this item
An Indie Next Selection for December 2021A Ms. Magazine Recommended Read for Fall 2021In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nar - living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time - began a correspondence in verse. Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of tki and tza: this season, this session. Here, from the "plague spring," through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Nar's renga charts the "differents and sames" of a now-shared experience.
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.
