The Narrow Road to the Interior: Poems

Kimiko Hahn, "a welcome voice of experimentation and passion" (Bloomsbury Review), takes up the Japanese prose-poetry genre zuihitsu'"literally "running brush," which utilizes tactics such as juxtaposition, contradiction, and broad topical variety'"in exploring her various identities as mother and lover, wife and poet, daughter of varied traditions.

"A kind of poet's journal or miscellany, mixing verse with prose, considered ideas with spontaneous exclamations, notes to friends and even e-mails, Hahn's seventh book adapts the traditional Japanese prose poetry genre zuihitsu to modern American aims. The notebook form allows room for scenes in Brooklyn and on Cape Cod; the poet's feelings about her preteen daughter and her former husband; her thoughts on academia and on Asian-Americanness; her experience of her own body, in youth, in sex and in middle age; and her reactions to 9/11. Honesty has long stood among Hahn's strengths: 'I want hands on my face the way no husband or woman has ever held me.' Childhood recollections are also movingly evoked: 'I need not write about those snow forts where I lay on my back looking up at the ceiling turning into twilight, my mother calling from the trite threshold.' Hahn's self-consciousness about this cross-cultural form — a recurring theme — can become self-indulgent, and the development comes not from a change in Hahn, but from the terrorist attack on her city. No revelation emerges at notebook's end. And yet her individual musings retain their force, even in a form Hahn (The Artist's Daughter, 2004) calls 'a kind of fragmented anything.' (July)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

An expansive new work from a poet of "rigorous intelligence, fierce anger, and deep vulnerability" (Mark Doty).

Kimiko Hahn, "a welcome voice of experimentation and passion" (Bloomsbury Review), takes up the Japanese prose-poetry genre zuihitsu literally "running brush," which utilizes tactics such as juxtaposition, contradiction, and broad topical variety in exploring her various identities as mother and lover, wife and poet, daughter of varied traditions.

Kimiko Hahn is the author of several books of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior, The Artist's Daughter, Mosquito and Ant, and Toxic Flora. Her many honors include the American Book Award. She lives in New York City.