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Rating: 
Summary: Desesperanto a disappointment
Review: I do not doubt the talent or craft of Hacker in her writing-It was just difficult to love her poems because it was so hard to relate. Hacker's imagery and way with words and rhythm is something I admire. Also, her published tribute to her friends such as June Jordan, Muriel and Hayden is an eternal way to show your love and endearment for someone. Another admiration I have for Hacker's writings is her ability to weave in tangible realities into her poems as well as her knowledge of books. There are too many to quote, so I just hope you'll see for yourself when you read the book.
I would not recommend this book to a college student such as myself. I found many of Hacker's poems to be redundant and unattached. It was hard for someone like my self to relate to many of her poems; one, because of the switch in language. Since I do not know French, it was difficult to grasp what she was trying to say. Even after looking up phrases, it was still hard to make sense of it all. Also, she describes many places in Paris and some traditions. To better appreciate it, I think that the reader would have to had visited or lived there as well.
As a recommendation to the publishers: A guide and a history of Hacker as well as the people she writes about would be wonderful to be published along with this book. It would help out a lot!
Rating: 
Summary: Read the Book
Review: I'm glad there are some blank pages in the back of this book because it gives me a place to jot notes. What's happened around this book since it's publication-silence-(i.e. so few reviews) is part and partial/symptomatic of what the poet decries in her first poem-a prologue to the rest of the book-as the "abandoned dissident discourse" brought on by "leaden words like 'Homeland.'" Are reviewers too lazy, too busy, too afraid to take on the challenges a book like this puts forth? This book asks that we do our homework or that we be as well read, as engaged in the real world of current and past politics and policies as the author is. The book calls for each reader to write his/her own reader's guide (much as Hacker's earlier poem "Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found" demanded: "Make your own footnotes; it will do you good.") Hacker's aim, in part, is to make us aware of the people, the public people, who populate her text, people such as June Jordon, Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Neruda, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Hayden Carruth, all of them politically engaged poets who considered themselves charged, as poets, with the duty to speak out against the ills of the world around them. As Hacker does. Poetry is for an elite few! Poof! This poetry is available to anyone who takes the time to read it-to shut off CNN, "Friends" and FOX News and delight in the sounds that cascade and roll over us and give us what the best poetry has forever: delight to the ear because of its musical/verbal genius, its use of assonance, consonance, rhyme of every kind, alliteration. The poems deliver the kind of pleasure successfully completing a jigsaw puzzle does and at the same time hit home with their portrayal of human experiences that most of us have lived through: the loss of a loved one to cancer, the experience of being jilted by a lover, the fear of death, the fear of life as we know it today in the "homeland." Read it and think. Read it and look up the proper names. Read it and weep. Read it and carry on.
Rating:
Summary: A History Lesson
Review: Though Desesperanto is rather challenging (with every other poem requiring the use of either a French-English dictionary or Google), Marilyn Hacker's use of everyday places and real scenarios draws the reader into her world. Before finishing some poems, such as "On the Stairway", one is almost forced to look up certain things (in this case, Violette Leduc). Desesperanto is not just an interactive history lesson. The book serves as Hacker's stepping-stone toward opening the readers' eyes to the lives of writers-- from quests for equality to the perfect little restaurant. Muriel Rukeyser to June Jordan to Violette Leduc, Desesperanto is a wake-up call for every writer, and reader, as to how a poet is as a person, not just as a figurehead.
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