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).

Comments

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

kimiko is the shiz! fo' sho!

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

she's pretty rad

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll have to pick this up next. I love Kimiko Hahn!

Kimiko is <3

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I like The Unbearable Heart a lot! Of her other collections, I've only read Mosquito and Ant, which was okay but not as great as UH. She's also coming to town to do a reading next Wednesday. I'm totally excited. :D

Re: Kimiko is <3

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

I'm totally jealous! I'm interested to check out the intertextual poems you mentioned in the later part of the book. They sound like they might be earlier zuihitsu. I'm still partial to The Narrow Road to the Interior, but it could just be because it's what I've been writing in for the past two years.

Re: Kimiko is <3

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

There is a zuihitsu in The Unbearable Heart. The intertextual poems are sort of collage poems, incorporating extensive quotations from other texts like The Tale of Genji, Edward Said's Orientalism, and writings by Flaubert and Barthes....