A Different Distance - by Marilyn Hacker & Karthika Naïr (Paperback)

About the Book

"Celebrated poets Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naèir compose a collaborative poem marking a year of friendship through stillness and grief"--

Book Synopsis

An Indie Next Selection for December 2021

A Ms. Magazine Recommended Read for Fall 2021

In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr--living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time--began a correspondence in verse.

Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of tōki and tōza: this season, this session. Here, from the "plague spring," through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Naïr's renga charts the "differents and sames" of a now-shared experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity persists--even thrives--in the face of a strange new kind of isolation. Between "ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones," there's cancer and chemotherapy and the aches of an aging body. There is grief for the loss of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States, Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where we all are "mere atoms of water, / each captained by protons of hydrogen, hurtling earthward."

At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history.

Review Quotes

Praise for A Different Distance

"As a time capsule for the pandemic, A Different Distance captures how healing it can be to hold each other close in times of distress."--NPR Morning Edition

"A renga naturally lends itself to a spare profundity, and in Hacker and Naïr's able hands . . . the enormity of the poets' emotions and experiences are deeply rendered and strike so very close to home, as intended."--Angela María Spring, Washington Independent Review of Books

"This unique and lovely volume of correspondence between two friends in France, who are also poets, is based on the ancient Japanese practice of renga, or 'linked verse.' In this collaboration, Hacker and Naïr alternative stanzas that focus on their lives in the pandemic; themes include aging, illness and loss as well as compassion, community and unity." --Ms. Magazine, "Great Reads for Fall 2021"

"The poems bear witness to what many people experienced, cities shut down and radical changes to daily life . . . This book of poetry preserves a written record of the shared human experience COVID-19 forced upon us, forever altering our lives."--Booklist

"A Different Distance marks the pandemic era with rich complexity and without any voyeurism, capturing the exact temporality of this durational crisis. I hope that future readers will return to this work for years to come to understand something not only of isolation, but also to learn about seasons, time of day, and about how one can summon presence even in the long absence of another."--Megan Fernandes, Poetry Foundation's "Harriet Books"

"The two authors offer both a useful reconceptualization of distance and an ode to friendship. Hacker and Naïr bring wisdom and empathy to a challenging historical moment in these rich and thoughtful pages." --Publishers Weekly

"[These poems are] briskly alive, and listening responsively to one another. They contain the energy of their moment, and the pleasure of spontaneous verbal interaction . . . Distinctly personal moments and moods are caught by each poet 'just for a rainbow while' as Naïr memorably puts it. Even though intertextuality is highlighted, their voices are enjoyably distinct."--Carol Rumens, Guardian

"Exquisite . . . Of the many books written during and about the pandemic, this deserves to be a classic."--Kim Fay, Electric Literature

"Two writers and friends, both translators of words, of movement, of motion itself, find themselves separate from each other in a city under lockdown, their own bodies isolated, the public world around them, the streets of Paris, emptied. In sinuous couplets they begin a correspondence, not merely a correspondence but a renga, a linking, an attempt at building a community, at recording a history, at imagining a future of touch again. Hacker's sublime handling of form, rhyme, and couplet is already legendary, and Naïr, with a subtle and dazzling choreographic sense of structure, meets her as the perfect partner." --Kazim Ali

"The dearth, in my two lands / of roses for all the graves" so begins this deeply moving account of two major poets' determination to overcome the deafening silence and distance of Paris's Covid lockdown. This masterful sequence takes up the ancient renga form, with its covenant of sharing. Written over the course of a year, it explores not only the interiority of quarantine and Karthika's struggle with cancer, but resolutely opens out towards the world. In this record of a year when "with or without our selfhood" each tried to survive, A Different Distance affirms that the miraculously healing art of poetry can even arise from such conditions--essential and new. -Ellen Hinsey

"Friends, poets, and Paris residents Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr wrote a renga (a linked poem) over the course of a year, from March 2020 to March 2021. The project was born out of the full lockdown that was declared in France in March 2020. For the most part, the first line of one of the poems in A Different Distance makes use of a word used in the last stanza of the previous poem. This gave the collection as a whole a very smooth continuity, almost like watching poets bat words back and forth in a tennis match. At times, the poems speak of politics--both familiar and not familiar. And then too, the women share their personal experiences: a battle with cancer and chemo. Their collection also has the feel of accidental publication--the reader gets the feeling these two friends would have sent the poems back and forth regardless if anyone else would someday see them, as thought they were writing for an audience of two. Reading this collection is a lovely, lovely experience." --Jen Wills Geraedts, Beagle and Wolf Books & Bindery

"A collaborative work of poetry gifts to us all out of pandemic observations. Full of feelings and with the playful feel of letters sent between two close friends. Their sharing is the sharing of experience for all of us." --Carrie Koepke, Skylark Bookshop

Praise for Marilyn Hacker

"There is no poet writing in English with a better claim for the Nobel Prize in Literature than Marilyn Hacker."--A.M. Juster, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A major poet . . . She transcends the very material she collects and alters."--Grace Schulman, Kenyon Review

"[Hacker] remains an undisputed master of formal verse. . . . One of the most extraordinary innovative poets writing today. No other poet manages the casual pyrotechnics she accomplishes in form."--Carol Muske-Duke, Los Angeles Times

"Hacker is an essential American poet. . . . This is a poet of dazzling opposites. Her formal variety exists with a strong-willed vernacular; her lyric wryness with a determined narrative."--Eavan Boland

"Hacker's poetry passes loss through wit, and makes it sing."--Diane Middlebrook

Praise for Karthika Naïr

"Naïr's poems embody the fierce human impulse to survive in a marauding universe where dreams are constantly snuffed out (by design, legislation or indifference). This is poetry in which every word, every breath is acknowledged with gratitude as fragile, hard-won, intensely and desperately precious."--Arundhathi Subramaniam, Poetry International

Praise for Karthika Naïr's Until the Lions

"Naïr's feminist take on the Mahabharata, India's great epic, is an astonishing demonstration of the power of translation to reshape and renew the literature of the past."--Edwin Frank, Words Without Borders

"Naïr's intervention--a series of dramatic monologues that give the epic's women psychological depth, wrath and despair--is brilliantly executed."--Times Literary Supplement

"Naïr . . . powerfully reimagines the national epic from the margins, allowing the suppressed voices to be centered and given subjectivity. Lyrical and somatically dense, the prose and verse of this book creates an intense and coruscating chorus. In a world that seems more riven by the political tensions of capital and multiplicity, that seems more dangerous and conflicted, this epic feels like a balm."--Kazim Ali

"Until the Lions is the Mahabharata I longed for as a child. These are the voices I imagined as I sat through enforced viewings of the endless TV series, bristling with waxed mustachios and phallic posturing. Naïr has pulled off a truly epic feat. Both the scope of her ambition and the skill of her execution inspire awe and elation."--Shailja Patel

"Whether it's about war, grief, love-making, or revenge, every poem of Until the Lions is charged with Naïr's electric voice. The lines fairly hum with it. In a strange unexpected way, this epic re-singing is also a deeply personal book."--Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

"The Mahabharata will always take you back to the deepest existential questions. It continues to instigate superlative writing as well. Until the Lions is an unshakable masterpiece of modern poetry, one of the great retellings of the text."--Indian Express

"Until the Lions is a triumph of narrative and poetic risk-taking. Five years in the making, Naïr's collection of poems, written in the voices of women in the Mahabharata, has been rightly hailed as a magnum opus by critics."--Aditya Mani Jha, Wasafiri

"Until the Lions is a powerful lesson in how the legacy of hate can flow from one generation to another. Naïr's writing is constantly informed by the intricate structures of choreography and, at the same time, has had a profound influence on several prominent dance artists of this generation."--Alistair Spalding

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the coauthor of A Different Distance. She is an editor, translator, and author of sixteen collections of poetry. Her first book, Presentation Piece, received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. Hacker is a winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the National Poetry Series Robert Fagels Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She has been an editor for the Kenyon Review and Ploughshares, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and professor of English at the City College of New York. She lives in Paris, France.

Karthika Naïr is the coauthor of A Different Distance. She is a dance producer and curator, and author of four books, including, most recently, Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, a retelling of the ancient epic in multiple poetic forms. Naïr is also the principal scriptwriter for the dance production DESH, choreographed and performed by Akram Khan. Naïr's poetry has been published in Granta, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Review (UK), the Literary Review, Poetry International, Indian Literature, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, and the Forward Book of Poetry 2017. She lives in Paris, France.