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. Kimiko Hahn's collection takes shape as a series of wide-ranging correspondences that are in turn precocious and wise, angry and wistful.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Hahns 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 mothers 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. Hahns 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 Kafkas 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 shes not addressing her contemporary friend in these revealing and intimate poems, Hahn imagines herself as one of the Immortal Sistersa 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). Hahns Asiatic pretenses, though occasionally intoxicating, are marred by her trendy references to colonialist and French feminist theory: Marxism is not dead, she asserts in one poem, while the Other is mentioned often throughout this volume of highly personalized political poetry. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A collection of humor, pathos and biting wit,
By Jeannine Hall Gailey (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mosquito and Ant: Poems (Paperback)
Sly wit and biting observations on contemporary womanhood couched in the context of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book and ancient Chinese and Japanese poets. I loved these poems, the adventurous avenues, the casual everyday activities juxtaposed with the startling image and wrenching confessions.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Poetry,
By Thelma L. King "poetryreader" (Mississippi, United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mosquito and Ant: Poems (Paperback)
I loved this book by Kimiko Hahn--the range, the inventivenss, the sense of play. I appreciate how her writing is enlivened by contemporary criticism and cultural studies while still being grounded in history and literature and apt observations of the world and its inhabitants.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Direct and subtle,
This review is from: Mosquito and Ant: Poems (Paperback)
Those familiar with Kimiko Hahn's previous collection, The Unbearable Heart, will find the same deeply personal quality but slightly brighter; no longer only on the subject of grief, Hahn shares other longings and speculations. These works are beautiful language without any of the unnecessary; simple and meaningful images, and direct ponderings.
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