Mosquito and Ant

by Kimiko Hahn

Overview

This breakthrough volume by award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn is her most rigorously "female" work to date as she reclaims the female body and reinvents an ancient Chinese correspondence.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393244861
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/23/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Kimiko Hahn has published more than ten collections on subjects ranging from Asian American identity and zuihitsu to rarified fields of science. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and, most recently, the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She teaches in the MFA program for Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.

Table of Contents

	The Razor	13
	Wax	17
	Morning Light	19
	Kafka's Erection	22
	Reflections Off White	24
	Note on Thematic Redundancy in Women's Verse, No. One	27
	Mosquito and Ant	28
	Jam	31
	The Tumbler	33
	Pine	35
	Note on Thematic Redundancy in Women's Verse, No. Two	37
	Translating Ancient Lines into the Vernacular	41
	Zinc	42
	The Downpour	44
	The Akashi Woman Speaks above a Whisper	50
	Garnet	51
	Chekov's Diner	53
	"Guard the Jade Pass"	55
	Orchid Root	57
	A Boat down the River of Yellow Silt	60
	Radiator	61
	Clippings	63
	Annotation in Her Last Court Diary	65
	Lady Rokujo Hails a Taxi	66
	Croissant	67
	A Late Entry in the First Wife's Pillow Book	69
	The Lunar Calendar She Pins to the Door	70
	The Intelligentsia of the Chin Dynasty Desire Desire	71
	Tissue	72
	Chuang Tzu's Mistress Sleeps in a Draft	73
	Untitled	74
	The New Calligraphy Tutor Is a Woman	76
	Responding to Light	77
	Komachi to Shosho on the Ninety-ninth Night	81
	Becoming the Mother	85
	Sewing without Mother	89
	Notes	101

Editorial Reviews

Bold, brave and sharp, Hahns fourth and fifth books (her third, The Unbearable Heart, won an American Book Award) are large in the range of their concerns and the intensity of their passions. If Volatile sounds pointed in its political rage, it rages in a distinct womans voice. If Mosquito and Ant speaks from rolesmother, daughter, wife, lover, friend, student, teacher, writerit never fails to experience these roles politically. In poems like Volatiles If You Speak, Hahn delves into the terrible history of Asian women; she engages their literary legacy in Guard the Jade Pass and others in Mosquito and Anta book named, she explains in a note, for a now nearly extinct secret script used by Chinese women [a millennium ago] to correspond with each other. Clippings makes witty, topical metaphor: Save clipping:/ Secret Life of Jupiters Moons./ Their molten cores may allow/ enough change/ for life. We can see the cracks/ on the bald surface/ through the delighted telescope. The poems in Volatile, often rough and slack, can challenge readers to confront their political aesthetics via the poetical: And if you think this is not a poem/ because Ive ranted without benefit of a metaphor/ think again.... (The Glass Bracelets). Both volumes contain long poems in prose paragraphs. Volatiles Possession (reprinted in The Best American Poetry, 1996) and Blindsided are zuihitsu, a form Hahn has reinvented primarily after The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon: lyrical prose paragraphs, casually notational, incorporate lists, anecdotes, commentary. As they circle back on themes and images, they weave meaning and grow immensely moving. In Mosquito and Ant, Downpour and Sewing Without Mother are also zuihitsu, the latter a magisterial elegy and compelling vision of the poets working life, present and future. Both books call on a visceral sexuality to make their concerns concrete, but M&A is the tighter, more fully realized work, redefining a space where women write to each other in charged, clandestine code. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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 Frenchfeminist theory: •Marxism is not dead,• she asserts in one poem, while •the Other• is mentioned often throughout this volume of highly personalized political poetry.

Kirkus Reviews