SOURCE: Howard, Ben. “Naturalist, Feminist, Professor.” Poetry 126, no. 1 (April 1975): 46-7.

In the following excerpt, Howard reviews Presentation Piece, maintaining that the volume should be read as a whole in order to appreciate the connections Hacker makes between individual poems through the use of repeated images.

Marilyn Hacker shares with Eiseley a certain tough-mindedness, but her concerns are narrower, her tone much harsher. She is a poet of emerging womanhood and the decaying American city. Her lines have a nervous intensity and a taut, glutted texture expressive of their subject:

Two bulldykes teased an acrid teenage whore pinioned with dexies to the lobby door and wondered if distinction could be made among us, who was trick and who was trade. 

“the navigators”

In this and other poems Miss Hacker fuses conventional stanzaic form with squalid urban imagery and with a diction that is both fastidious and rich with slang...