A Stranger’s Mirror demonstrates Hacker’s continued formal mastery; she effortlessly spins one sonnet into two, then three, then seven, leaving readers always breathless for more…. read more
New Yorkers have a lot to look forward to in October: leather weather (finally!), oversized sweaters, some of the most inventive and intricate Halloween costumes in the world–and, of course, since 2007, the Academy of American Poets’ annual Poets Forum. Poets Forum is a celebration and examination of the form, where some of the sharpest and most exciting voices in American poetry gather to share their work and discuss their processes. Here’s ten reasons (of many) not to miss this year…… read more
What does it mean to be a Jewish writer? To write about the Jewish Lesbian experience? How do we passionately engage with thinking about identity while considering the intersection of both lesbian and Jewish politics and the inherent aversion to labels?
This collection of poetry offers several insights into the hermeneutics of identity in literature and religion…. read more
The 5th Annual Poets Forum, hosted by the Academy of American Poets, kicks off tonight with its Chancellors Reading at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Among the Chancellors participating are queer greats Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, recent National Book Award Finalist Carl Phillips, and Kay Ryan, who–having recently received both a Pulitzer Prize… read more
“There is queer activism in the African diaspora and wherever that movement is, there is always cultural production.” I was introduced to the iconic Cheryl Clarke while organizing a conference on spirituality and sexuality with writer and scholar Ashon T. Crawley for the Newark Pride Alliance in Newark, NJ in 2008. Ashon and I marveled… read more
This April, magazines and blogs across the web have been running poem specials to celebrate National Poetry Month. With only a couple days left, I thought I’d take stock and share some of my favorites so far:… read more
2010 was a great year for LGBT poetry, bringing us some exciting new voices, books, and trends. As the year comes to an end, here are some of the highlights: This fall seminal poet Mary Oliver, whom The Weekly Standard has described as “among the finest poets the English language has ever produced,” published Swan:… read more
This week’s poem comes to us from Marilyn Hacker’s 2000 collection Squares and Courtyards (W.W. Norton & Co.), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2001 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry…. read more
Lambda Award Finalist Palimpsest—text that has been incompletely erased so that another text can be written over it, often leaving legible traces of the old text underneath—is a word that recurs in Marilyn Hacker’s latest collection of poems, Names, and it stands as a unifying concept in this accomplished book, for the words and spirits… read more
MARY OLIVER Tell me, what is it you will do/with your one wild and precious life? —”The Summer Day” So closes Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” Every time I read those words I still feel as though I cannot breathe. These questions…I’m plagued daily, monthly, yearly, with questions like these, how can I possibly… read more
