About the Book

IN MARCH 2020, WHEN THE WORLD WENT INTO LOCKDOWN TO PREVENT THE SPREAD OF THE CORONAVIRUS, POETS AND FRIENDS MARILYN HACKER AND KARTHIKA NAÏR—LIVING MERE MILES FROM EACH OTHER BUT SEPARATED BY CIRCUMSTANCE, AND SPURRED BY THIS EXTRAORDINARY TIME—BEGAN A CORRESPONDENCE IN VERSE.
Renga, an ancient Japanese form of collaborative poetry, is comprised of alternating tanka beginning with the themes of toki and toza: this season, this session. Here, from the ‘plague spring’, through a year in which seasons are marked by the waxing and waning of the virus, Hacker and Naïr’s renga charts the ‘differents and sames’ of a now-shared experience. Their poems witness a time of suspension in which some things, somehow, press on relentlessly, in which solidarity persists—even thrives—in the face of a strange new kind of isolation. Between ‘ten thousand, yes, minutes of Bones’, there’s cancer and chemotherapy and the aches of an aging body. There is grief for the loss of friends nearby and concern for loved ones in the United States, Lebanon, and India. And there is a deep sense of shared humanity, where we all are ‘mere atoms of water, each captained by protons of hydrogen, hurtling earthward.’
At turns poignant and playful, the seasons and sessions of A Different Distance display the compassionate, collective wisdom of two women witnessing a singular moment in history.

About the Author

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons and A Stranger’s Mirror (longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award); a collaborative book, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi; and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices. She is a former editor of the Kenyon Review and of the French literary journal Siècle 21. She received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN/Voelcker Award for her own work, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011.
Karthika Naïr is a poet, playwright, fabulist and librettist. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year. Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi—illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet—won the 2023 Prix Felipé for ‘ecological children’s literature’.
Naïr is the co-founder of choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s dance company, Eastman. In 2012, she blueprinted the biannual Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Awards (PECDA) for Prakriti Foundation, a unique initiative for dance in the Indian Subcontinent, and she remained its artistic director across four biannual editions.