Mosquito and Ant.

• Author: Brouwer, Joel

Mosquito and Ant by Kimiko Hahn W.W. Norton & Co. 102 pages. $21.00 (cloth).

The title of Kimiko Hahn's new collection of poems refers to nu shu, a thousand-year-old secret script used by Chinese women for private correspondence. Hahn portrays the script as a kind of secret code for the feminine side of the gender wars, and many of the poems in Mosquito and Ant take the form of confidential letters to "L," a woman friend to whom the poet turns for counsel and comfort. Since the suggestion is that we are reading in these poems not just a private correspondence, but a coded one, we expect the correspondents will be totally candid, and the eavesdropper in us is aroused.

Hahn uses a number of traditional Asian poetic forms in Mosquito and Ant, such as zuihitsu, a Japanese form Hahn defines as "stray notes, expressing random thoughts in a casual manner," or "a free-flowing brush." "Sewing without Mother," the final, and best, poem in the book, is a long zuihitsu written to the author's sister. The poem works as a kind of diary, and though the entries are extremely diverse in subject and tone, they harmonize to create a rich meditation on motherhood. Whether Hahn is writing about her children, her study of literature, her identity as an Asian-American, her father, her friends, or her career as a teacher, every entry seems to circle back to her mother, and "waking for the phone at 2 AM for the news that would change our lives forever: mother's death." Like "Becoming the Mother," an earlier poem in the book, "Sewing without Mother" builds a bridge between Hahn's grief over her mother's death and her joy in being a mother herself.

As with tending a newborn, the days pass slowly, the months quickly. With each new season we all, even the littlest, recognize what mother has missed, and what we see through our loss, since she died over a year ago. Even the bamboo shoots that father digs up with the girls and parboils for us to take home. Mother had suggested it and now we eat them thinking--how tender, how tender. Hahn is also drawn to the mosquito and ant because of their quiet persistence and strength:

I want my letters to resemble tiny ants scrawled across this page. ... their strategy is simple: the shortest distance between two points is tenacity not seduction. I want my letters to imitate mosquitoes as they loop around the earlobe ... the impossible task of slapping one.... ("Mosquito and Ant") The ant is an apt mascot for Hahn's poetry, which...