The Narrow Road to the Interior

by Kimiko Hahn

Overview

An expansive work inspired by Japanese prose-poetry from a poet of “rigorous intelligence, fierce anger, and deep vulnerability” (Mark Doty).

Kimiko Hahn, "a welcome voice of experimentation and passion" (Bloomsbury Review), takes up the Japanese prose-poetry genre zuihitsu—literally "running brush," which utilizes tactics such as juxtaposition, contradiction, and broad topical variety—in exploring her various identities as mother and lover, wife and poet, daughter of varied traditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393244878
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/23/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	789 KB

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.

Editorial Reviews

A kind of poet's journal or miscellany, mixing verse with prose, considered ideas with spontaneous exclamations, notes to friends and even e-mails, Hahn's seventh book adapts the traditional Japanese prose poetry genre zuihitsu to modern American aims. The notebook form allows room for scenes in Brooklyn and on Cape Cod; the poet's feelings about her preteen daughter and her former husband; her thoughts on academia and on Asian-Americanness; her experience of her own body, in youth, in sex and in middle age; and her reactions to 9/11. Honesty has long stood among Hahn's strengths: "I want hands on my face the way no husband or woman has ever held me." Childhood recollections are also movingly evoked: "I need not write about those snow forts where I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling turning into twilight, my mother calling from the trite threshold." Hahn's self-consciousness about this cross-cultural form-a recurring theme-can become self-indulgent, and the development comes not from a change in Hahn, but from the terrorist attack on her city. No revelation emerges at notebook's end. And yet her individual musings retain their force, even in a form Hahn (The Artist's Daughter, 2004) calls "a kind of fragmented anything." (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In creating The Pillow Book, a tenth-century Japanese vernacular masterpiece that mixes court gossip, classical poetry, and literary appreciations in diary format, Sei Shonagon developed a writing style called zuihitsu. Hahn uses this style (comparable, perhaps, to today's blog) to great advantage in her seventh book (after The Artist's Daughter). Here, the dissembling of a destructive marriage becomes the structuring device for an unwieldy stockpile of emotions, places, and people, a collage of textures and tones: "My daughters were too young to understand the/ racism of the summer community and cried on the ferry going/ home, their wet faces sprayed by the waves as the captain sped/ onto his destination. The crab cakes in the little stand by the dock cheered everyone up for different reasons." List poems that recall those of Sei Shonagon, English versions of tanka (a Japanese poetic form), prose sections on Japanese literature, and meditations on a positive PAP smear and a halfhearted flirtation with a lesbian friend are all bundled into a journey that transforms master haiku poet Matsuo Basho's famous title into a startling metaphor. Hahn's work has received several prestigious prizes, including the American Book Award. This coherent narrative of textured intimacies is among her strongest; recommended for most collections. E.M. Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine LLP Law Lib., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal