Transitions: New and Selected Sonnets

New and selected sonnets from a treasured poet who "insists upon the rawness of experience and the metamorphosis of form with equal fervor and makes them both speak with the same voice" (W. S. Merwin).

Over the course of her celebrated fifty-year career, Marilyn Hacker has continuously proven to be a timely, fearless, and lauded poet highly skilled in a wide variety of forms--most famously, the sonnet. Transitions is her first volume consisting entirely of the beloved form.

Hacker is a poet of quiet mastery. In her hands, the sonnet, despite the stricture of meter and rhyme, blooms into a living, breathing thing, one that's contemporary, confessional, and subversive. Sentences effortlessly fall into formal constraint, and words that evoke the pleasure of everyday language become Petrarchan rhymes. As Jan Heller Levi wrote, "No one writes about lust and lunch like Marilyn Hacker. And certainly no one has done more to demonstrate that form has nothing to do with formula."

From her early sonnets to those written decades later, this book offers a portrait of the seasons of an extraordinary life, a life lived between New York, Paris, and Beirut as an activist, a polyglot, and a queer woman. We see Hacker's speaker grappling with young motherhood, the dissolution of her heterosexual marriage, middle age, relationships with women, chronic illness, care received from her adult child, and her old age, all while confronting geopolitical tension and global tragedies, from the AIDS epidemic to the war in Gaza.

Transitions is a remarkable celebration of a life lived in verse. Intelligent, contemplative, and justice-driven, this profound collection cements Marilyn Hacker's reputation of one of the indispensable poets of our time.

Author: Marilyn Hacker
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 04/21/2026
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781571315724


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/20/2026

About the Author
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently Calligraphies; two collaborative books, A Different Distance with Karthika Naïr and DiaspoRenga with Deema K. Shehabi; one essay collection, Unauthorized Voices; and twenty-two collections of translations from the French, including Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, Samira Negrouche's The Olive Trees' Jazz, and Claire Malroux's Daybreak. Over the course of her fifty-year career, she has received numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Presentation Piece, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Argana International Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a former editor of The Kenyon Review and the French literary journal Siècle 21, and she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives between Paris and New York.