asianamlitfans | Kimiko Hahn's _The Artist's Daughter

For my independent study on the meaning of history, spaces, and movements for Korean adoptees, I have been using two forms. Kimiko Hahn's experimental zuihitsu's and persona poems. The Artist's Daughter is fascinating for this project because Hahn really explores the issues surrounding her mother's death and her own memory through personae that remind me of Ai's persona pieces in Vice. The stand-out piece in Hahn's book is her huge zuihitsu, "Exhume," which begins with the epigraph: "I should like to wallow in corpses." It's interesting how she brings in other voices within the piece. She tries to get inside the minds of people who abuse corpses, and engage in necrophilia and exhumation as ways to feel and live again using texts, emails, and discussions that analyze her own interest in these subjects within the piece. In fact, life, memory, exhumation, and necrophilia are recurring themes throughout the book making it a rather dark collection of poetry. While it's not my favorite of Hahn's, she is using writing and imagination in interesting ways, and I found the book quite good overall. One of the more uplifting poems is called "In Childhood" and it is the first poem in the book. It sets the tone:

In Childhood

things don't die or remain damaged
but return: stumps grow back hands,
a head reconnects to a neck,
a whole corpse rises blushing and newly elastic.
Later this vision is not True:
the grandmother remains dead
not hibernating in a wolf's belly.
Or the blue parakeet does not return
from the little grave in the fern garden
though one may wake in the morning
thinking mother's call is the bird.
Or maybe the bird is with the grandmother
inside light. Or grandmother was the bird
and is now the dog
gnawing on the chair leg.
Where do the gone things go
when the child is old enough
to walk herself to school,
her playmates already
pumping so high the swing hiccups?