Mosquito & Ant

By Kimiko Hahn

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393320626
• ISBN13: 9780393320626
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A collection of humor, pathos and biting wit

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.

Great Poetry

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.

Direct and subtle

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.