SOURCE: Gates, Beatrix. Review of Going Back to the River. The Nation, New York 252, no. 2 (21 January 1991): 64-7.

In the following review, Gates discusses Hacker's lesbian identity as it informs her poetry.

Marilyn Hacker has given us six books of poetry as well as Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, a novel in verse that was put out by a new publisher who was better able to appreciate the hot chronicle of a year in lesbian romance. Hacker has always risked—through her fearless choice of subject and form. I remember hearing her read “Part of a True Story,” a poem dedicated to Margaret Delany that evokes a letter dictated by Harriet Tubman to Amelia Bloomer requesting a new bloomer suit. Tubman, who was known as “the General” even by her commanding officer after she led a successful raid up the Combahee River with a detachment of...