Calligraphies

These formally ambitious and energetic poems by Hacker (A Different Distance) feature a progression of sonnet crowns, ghazals, sapphics, pantoums, and linked haiku that carry the reader through a litany of maladies. These include the pandemic, political and personal pains (“the desiccated nerves of lost desires”), the plight of refugees, the difficulty of learning Arabic, and the loneliness of quarantine. Each stanza picks up a thread from the last, the dismal emotional weather relieved by the pleasures of a good wine, an open-air market, or a veal chop. Hacker calls out nonsense as she sees it: “‘To write a sonnet is a fascist act’—/ Suggest that to the next tyre-burning goon this winter!” But she is equally hard on herself, as in the witty and perfect ghazal she calls “Myself.” She dedicates poems to Karthika Nair, a French Indian poet, and Fadwa Suleiman, the late Syrian actor and civil war activist—two among the many people Hacker has worked with in Paris and elsewhere. These varied and powerful poems highlight the healing that resides in poetic collaboration and friendship across borders. (Apr.)