Transitions: New and Selected Sonnets

by Marilyn Hacker

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

Published April 21, 2026

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Sirah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was pretty excited about this book when I first saw it because I've discovered that I vastly prefer poetry that has form rather than free verse. However, I discovered that this book is a translated work, and while the translator no doubt did a phenomenal job conveying the essence of Hacker's poems, the poetic meter just wasn't. Furthermore, this set of poems was pretty psychological, which isn't what I look for in poems, so it wouldn't have been a good fit for me even if it had contained a stronger sense of rhythm.