Mosquito and Ant: Poems

by Hahn, Kimiko

• ISBN13: 9780393047325
• ISBN10: 0393047326
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-05-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

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 fu --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. 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.

Table of Contents

The Razor	13	(17)
Wax	17	(2)
Morning Light	19	(3)
Kafka's Erection	22	(2)
Reflections Off White	24	(3)
Note on Thematic Redundancy in Women's Verse, No. One	27	(1)
Mosquito and Ant	28	(3)
Jam	31	(2)
The Tumbler	33	(2)
Pine	35	(2)
Note on Thematic Redundancy in Women's Verse, No. Two	37	(4)
Translating Ancient Lines into the Vernacular	41	(1)
Zinc	42	(2)
The Downpour	44	(6)
The Akashi Woman Speaks above a Whisper	50	(1)
Garnet	51	(2)
Chekov's Diner	53	(2)
``Guard the Jade Pass''	55	(2)
Orchid Root	57	(3)
A Boat down the River of Yellow Silt	60	(1)
Radiator	61	(2)
Clippings	63	(2)
Annotation in Her Last Court Diary	65	(1)
Lady Rokujo Hails a Taxi	66	(1)
Croissant	67	(2)
A Late Entry in the First Wife's Pillow Book	69	(1)
The Lunar Calendar She Pins to the Door	70	(1)
The Intelligentisa of the Chin Dynasty Desire Desire	71	(1)
Tissue	72	(1)
Chuang Tzu's Mistress Sleeps in a Draft	73	(1)
Untitled	74	(2)
The New Calligraphy Tutor Is a Woman	76	(1)
Responding to Light	77	(4)
Komachi to Shosho on the Ninety-ninth Night	81	(4)
Becoming the Mother	85	(4)
Sewing without Mother	89	(12)
Notes	101