Kimiko Hahn's The Unbearable Heart

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I finally got around to reading Kimiko Hahn's The Unbearable Heart.



I absolutely love this collection of poems. The first half is so incredibly sad, though, dealing as the poems do with the sudden loss of the speaker's mother. I also liked the poems in the second two-thirds that were longer and more intertextual, engaging with Murasaki, Barthes, Said, and Flaubert. I like what she does with the multiple voices (sometimes cited from texts, sometimes incorporated speech from people like her father).