The Artist's Daughter: Poems - Softcover

Hahn, Kimiko

Softcover

ISBN 10: 039332558X ISBN 13: 9780393325584

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

Synopsis

"Kimiko Hahn stands as a welcome voice of experimentation and passion."―Bloomsbury Review

Kimiko Hahn's poetry explores the interplay―and tensions―among her various identities: mother, lover, wife, poet, and daughter of both the Midwest and Asia. However astonishing her subjects―from sideshow freaks to sadomasochistic fantasy―they ultimately emerge in this startling collection as moving images of the deepest levels of our shared humanity.

About this title

About the Author

Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten collections of poems. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Voelcker Award, and a Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation, Queens College, City University of New York, and lives in Queens.

From Publishers Weekly

The titular poet-daughter of this sixth volume dwells in a dark, sexually fervent, phantasmagoric world inspired by Germanic fairy tales. Oozing rivers, bloody cages and the artist's studio decorated "in half a dozen versions of black" are ruled over by the precepts of Freud and Jung via modern sadomasochistic imagery: "if he turns his gaze, she will beat him bloody until there is nothing left but a pile of teeth. She will hold a mirror in front of herself so all he can see are her fingertips and crown." Notes on dismemberment and bits from Gray's Anatomy are the basis for mordant rewritings of classic tales from the Brothers Grimm; in a daughter's hands, Freud's unheimlich is the slip between an ideal of motherhood, and the reality: "I understand... the stepmother in the cross-hatched woods/ abandoning the children." An odd poem-by-poem reclamation of power takes place via the recitation of sexual taboos from incest to necrophilia, and (as in Hahn's previous collection, Mosquito and Ant) poems that linger over the death of the poet's mother. Much of the book's descriptive vocabulary deploys post-structuralist theoretical constructs: the other, mirroring, "Unbecoming, a desperate homesickness/ even at home. " Self-conscious, grave and saturated with anger, this book tracks a distinctly gendered attempt to break through the emotional tether of bereavement and the irritant of social mores. If it doesn't quite succeed, it is nevertheless a primal scene of familial power.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 039332558X
• ISBN 13: 9780393325584
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 92