The Unbearable Heart by Kimiko Hahn

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

I remembered meeting Kimiko Hahn and being so intimidated because just a year before I had read The Unbearable Heart and had this really visceral experience to it. The text really plows through the depths of loss and is unrelenting in a certain respect. I'm not surprised that it won the 1996 American Book Award. It is certainly very deserving!

The first poem, The Toll Attendant, pretty much sets the tone:

"white under a flourescent halo
horn-rimmed and high-pitched
collects our coins and give directions
to the hospital where mother's body
may be retrieved at our earliest convenience,
to a land perpetually 3:20 am
always raining heavily" (1).

I am always struck by the distinct contrast between the representation of this titular toll attendant against the situation the speaker finds herself within, which is having to deal with the death of her mother. Like Jeffrey Ethan Lee's identity papers, The Unbearable Heart, is significantly more autobiographical in tone. The zombie-like status of the toll attendant plays off upon the ghostly nocturnal topography that the speaker traverses, almost as if she has received entry into a labyrinthine necropolis. Admittance allows one to receive the hallowed object, in this case the dead body. The morbidity, so unassuming, therefore becomes all the more brutal and graphic. Time stops and the rupture in temporality once again signals a trauma, what literary critic Juliana Chang will develop as a kind of "racial melancholia" at stake and reverberating over the course of the poetry collection. A searing work.