Hahn's first volume to be released by a major publisher continues
many of the themes from her earlier work, especially The Unbearable
Heart (1996), largely about her mother's violent accidental death.
Here, Hahn finds some distance from the event in her appropriation
of ancient Asian forms of writing: the title refers to the Soong
Dynasty calligraphy that served as a secret language between women;
and elsewhere she adopts the Japanese"pillow book" for her own
"stray notes" and "random thoughts." Hahn's poems to "L., "her
secret correspondent, are a catalogue of "wanting," "longing," and
"desire": in "Wax," she admits her middle-aged wish for the
excitement of an initial encounter (not sex, which she claims,
after all, her generation "invented"); in "Kafka's Erection," she
asserts her need for this correspondence now that her daughters are
growing up and away; and in "Radiator," she seeks advice about
"M.," a man not her husband, whose "acid of coffee and tobacco" she
likes to taste. When she's not addressing her contemporary friend
in these revealing and intimate poems, Hahn imagines herself as one
of the "Immortal Sisters" - a group of Taoist poets from ancient
China who wrote "coy lines" in "The flat language / of pine and
orchid." Cross-cutting between the past and present, the poet
admires women who write for other women, detailing their
masturbation ("Annotation in Her Last Court Diary"), their love of
fruit ("A Boat down the River of Yellow Silt"), and lists of
mundane facts ("Clippings") or litanies of abuse ("The New
Calligraphy Tutor is a Woman"). Hahn's Asiatic pretenses, though
occasionally intoxicating, are marred by her trendy references to
colonialist and French feminist theory: "Marxism is not dead," she
asserts, while "the Other" is mentioned often throughout this
volume of highly personalized political poetry. (Kirkus Reviews)
Mosquito and Ant refers to the style in which nu shu--a nearly
extinct script used by Chinese women to correspond with one
another--is written. Here in this exciting and totally original
book of poems the narrator corresponds with L. about her hidden
passions, her relationship with her husband and adolescent
daughters, lost loves, and erotic fantasies. Kimiko Hahn's
collection takes shape as a series of wide-ranging correspondences
that are in turn precocious and wise, angry and wistful. Borrowing
from both Japanese and Chinese traditions, Hahn offers us an
authentic and complex narrator struggling with the sorrows and
pleasures of being a woman against the backdrop of her
Japanese-American roots.
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