New York 1976 2nd printing of first edition Knopf. ISBN 394-40070-4. Hardcover. Octavo, 109p., cloth. **Presentation copy signed by Hacker. Fine in Near Fine DJ.
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English.
Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Going Back to the River (1990). In 2009, Hacker won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Tales of A Severed Head by Rachida Madani.
On rereading this (and Samuel R. Delany's literary and sexual autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, simultaneously) for the first time in about 15 years, I find myself thinking about the person I was in the early 1990s: aspirations, relationships, identity. Parts of Delany's memoir can serve as annotations to Separations, since some of the poems chronicle events from their early relationship. On its own, Separations is a daunting book to read but certainly worth a long while.