Items related to Volatile
Synopsis
Poetry. In this book, Kimiko Hahn manages to take the air of atrocity we breathe in daily and turn it into fierce political/ lyrical poetry, in the tradition of Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy. Current events ripped open and the entrails exposed in living color. She is one of our strongest poets-Harvey Shapiro. In VOLATILE, Hahn's lyrical voice maintains its course through narratives ranging from quiet recollections of childhood to the sometimes unbearable horrors of the modern world: She watched her child starve. Watched her neighbor get clubbed to death. Watched another disappear./ (how the mind acts to what the body perceives)/ `Dissociation,' a state of altered consciousness. If I am on a freeway daydreaming and drive past the exit... (Blindsided: a zuihitsu). Kimiko Hahn is the author of AIR POCKET and EARSHOT (both from Hanging Loose Press) and THE UNBEARABLE HEART (Kaya), all of which are available from SPD.
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About the Author
Kimiko Hahn is the author of AIR POCKET; EARSHOT, awarded The Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; THE UNBEARABLE HEART (Kaya, 1996) which received an American Book Award; and MOSQUITO AND ANT (W. W. Norton, forthcoming 1999); and is currently collecting her short prose for AFTERBIRTH. Recent poetry can be found in KENYON REVIEW, MANOA, ANOTHER CHICAGO MAGAZINE, and BEST AMERICAN POETRY of 1996 (Scribners); her prose, in BOMB, THE GLOBAL REVIEW, TRIQUARTERLY REVIEW and the anthology CHARLIE CHAN IS DEAD (Penguin). In 1995, she wrote ten "portraits" of women for the two-hour HBO special "Ain't Nuthin' But A She-thing" for which she also did voice-overs; it aired in November of that year. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she has also been awarded a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award. Hahn is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Queens College/CUNY.
From Publishers Weekly
Bold, brave and sharp, Hahns fourth and fifth books (her third, The Unbearable Heart, won an American Book Award) are large in the range of their concerns and the intensity of their passions. If Volatile sounds pointed in its political rage, it rages in a distinct womans voice. If Mosquito and Ant speaks from rolesmother, daughter, wife, lover, friend, student, teacher, writerit never fails to experience these roles politically. In poems like Volatiles If You Speak, Hahn delves into the terrible history of Asian women; she engages their literary legacy in Guard the Jade Pass and others in Mosquito and Anta book named, she explains in a note, for a now nearly extinct secret script used by Chinese women [a millennium ago] to correspond with each other. Clippings makes witty, topical metaphor: Save clipping:/ Secret Life of Jupiters Moons./ Their molten cores may allow/ enough change/ for life. We can see the cracks/ on the bald surface/ through the delighted telescope. The poems in Volatile, often rough and slack, can challenge readers to confront their political aesthetics via the poetical: And if you think this is not a poem/ because Ive ranted without benefit of a metaphor/ think again.... (The Glass Bracelets). Both volumes contain long poems in prose paragraphs. Volatiles Possession (reprinted in The Best American Poetry, 1996) and Blindsided are zuihitsu, a form Hahn has reinvented primarily after The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon: lyrical prose paragraphs, casually notational, incorporate lists, anecdotes, commentary. As they circle back on themes and images, they weave meaning and grow immensely moving. In Mosquito and Ant, Downpour and Sewing Without Mother are also zuihitsu, the latter a magisterial elegy and compelling vision of the poets working life, present and future. Both books call on a visceral sexuality to make their concerns concrete, but M&A is the tighter, more fully realized work, redefining a space where women write to each other in charged, clandestine code.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHanging Loose Press
- Publication date1999
- ISBN 10 1882413563
- ISBN 13 9781882413560
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Edition number1
- Number of pages90
- Rating
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