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.

Few poets have been as successful as Hacker in negotiating the boundary of the feminist and lesbian canon while generating a buzz around their early work. Iambic and readable, the pieces in Selected Poems-taken from five previous volumes-use unique inversions to explore self and other through changing situations between friends, lovers, family, and one's surroundings: "Mother and daughter both, I see/ myself, the furious and unforgiven;/myself, the terrified and terrible;/ the child punished into autonomy;/the unhealed woman hearing her own voice damn/her to nightmares of the brooding girl." Often, these are poems of loss, of desire delayed, of pleasure deferred. Winter Numbers opens with a dark hymn to the AIDS and cancer dead and closes with an intensely personal verse journal of a battle with breast cancer. Between, there is (among other works) the passionate recollection of "Days of 1987": "Down and around the sheepshit and potholes, sudden/gravel crater macadam never levelled,/arms around your cornflower shirt, I gripped you:/we both were freezing." In Hacker we have a poet who has gone to the center while broadening the periphery. Both books are highly recommended for all collections.
Steve R. Ellis, Brooklyn
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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