SOURCE: Oles, Carole S. Review of Assumptions. The Nation, New York 240 (27 April 1985): 506-09.

In the following review, Oles discusses Hacker's treatment of mother/daughter relationships in her poetry collection Assumptions.

Marilyn Hacker's intelligence, wit, passion and craft have delighted her readers ever since Presentation Piece announced her arrival a decade ago. Assumptions, her fourth book, moves us with new strength and nerve. Hacker continues to explore the forms, powers and attributes a woman can assume, searching her past as the poems move from personal to mythic expressions of a woman's progress toward herself.

The personal tone of her work is clearest in the section of the book called “Inheritances,” where the pain of the past is revisited through the poet's relationship with her mother, for example, in this sonnet:

We shopped for dresses which were always wrong: sweatshop approximations of the leanlined girls' wear I studied in Seventeen...