Marilyn Hacker's Winter Numbers is a meditation on death, a collection of painful poems in the wake of losing loved ones to AIDS and cancer. The numbers referred to here are the metronomic beats of passing time, the mile markers on life's journey, the months remaining in a doctor's grim prognosis. The only solace is in connection, as Hacker writes in Year's End: "Underneath the numbers, how lives are braided." Highly recommended for the mortal.

From Publishers Weekly
This seventh volume of poems by NBA winner Hacker was nominated for an NBCC. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"In Hacker we have a poet who has gone to the center while broadening the periphery," said LJ's reviewer when these two works were published jointly. (LJ Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her seventh volume Marilyn Hacker confronts life and death at the end of our genocidal century, making another extraordinary contribution to the feminist and lesbian canon. Winter Numbers is pervaded by Hacker's awareness of being an agent in history. The long opening poem, "Against Elegies," is an impassioned meditation on the scourges of AIDS and cancer among the poet's friends and contemporaries, and the parallel scourge of social indifference. Other erotically tinged elegies lead to the account of her own battle with breast cancer. Among the many necessary works on breast cancer, Hacker's "Cancer Winter" will be cited for its affirmation, humor, and honesty. It received the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America and the B. F. Conners Award from the Paris Review.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This seventh volume of poems by NBA winner Hacker was nominated for an NBCC. (Oct.)

Library Journal