SOURCE: Stitt, Peter. “The Typical Poem.” Kenyon Review 8, no. 4 (fall 1986): 128-33.

In the following excerpt, Stitt reviews Assumptions, claiming that the “intentionally outrageous confessions” of the events of Hacker's own life are less effective than the poems about other people, which Stitt believes are among her best.

Half the poems of Marilyn Hacker present a special problem with respect to content—they are the intentionally outrageous confessions of a speaker who had an affair with a married man at the tender age of seventeen, who had an illegitimate baby with a man who, we are pointedly told, at the time of writing is himself sleeping with another man, and who describes herself in adulthood as “another Jewish lesbian in France.” The tenor of such poems may be judged by these lines from the poem “Fifteen to Eighteen”: “… as soon as I had tucked / into myself tucked in, to...