I loved this book by Kimiko Hahn--the range, the inventivenss, the sense of play. I appreciate how her writing is enlivened by contemporary criticism and cultural studies while still being grounded in history and literature and apt observations of the world and its inhabitants.

Those familiar with Kimiko Hahn's previous collection, The Unbearable Heart, will find the same deeply personal quality but slightly brighter; no longer only on the subject of grief, Hahn shares other longings and speculations. These works are beautiful language without any of the unnecessary; simple and meaningful images, and direct ponderings.

Kimiko Hahn's previous books, EAR SHOT and AIR POCKET, established her as one of the most exciting and innovative Asian American poets. Hahn's work explores the dangerously shifting ground of an urban (NYC) consciousness, illuminating scintillant conjunctures of race, sex and the historical moment. Formally innovative, obliquely contemplative, Hahn's poems pulse with an emotional and emotive urgency. THE UNBEARABLE HEART coheres around the recent tragic death of Hahn's mother, killed in an automobile accident. Propelled by this incident into areas of personal darkness, reflection and anguish, Hahn's poetry carries her previous concerns on the the existential condition and the literary presentation and representation of women, especially "exotic" women of color, into deeper, more intimate realms. Here's the complete text of the shortest poem in the book: "Father, Tomie and I stand at the hospital window/ to look beyond our lives without mother/ and see a stray calico dart into rubbish./ There is something there it wants." ("The Stray") Other poems examine the mother's continuing presence in the lives of the family as they go on, from the affecting title poem which evokes the mother's spirit---momentarily---in direct address, even as Hahn notes that the woman's graddaughters will recall her "not as a snapshot in the faults of the mind/ but as the incense in their hair long after the reading of the Lotus Sutra." While Hahn sorts through her own grief, the memories of life together and the hospital and funeral still fresh, the realization emerges of life within life, of overlapping existences and the continuation of the grandmother in the granddaughters, in prayer and in transit, in egg and flashlight, "in the train an hour along the Sound, distant from the details of grief..." Other poems focus on the stunned father, or the effect of the mother's death on the language which they all share, on their own personal history and their on-going lives. "Cuttings," a long prose poem about her father, ends with the dark, upturned earth imagery that was part of this one bicultural family's urban lore: "Father finds an envelope of mariold seeds mother saved and lets the children scatter them. The composted earth smells fertile like the pail she kept with egg shells and melon rinds." If many of the poems on her family resonate with vividly recalled details that evoke both the absent mother and the presence of her spirit (in ethos, memory or continuance in some other form), the long poems that close the book, "Cruising Barthes," and "The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem," as well as a section of retold Japanese folktales recombine Hahn's deconstruction of Japanese literary motifs and Orientalist readings with a postmodern bent, triangulating her musings on gender and sexuality with quotations from Roland Barthes, THE TALE OF GENJI, Flaubert, Edward Said and others to create a provocative revisionist dialogue. The meticulous ordering of the poems in THE UNBEARABLE HEART entwines the experience of her family with Hahn's previous themes of cross-cultural traditions of sex and gender, enlarging her poetics, her vision to encompass both lives and ideas, contemporary circumstances as well as the cultural and literary rooms which open out on it. THE UNBEARABLE HEART imagines the most intimate levels of vision and identity, of family and familiarity, and the ways which they ultimately transcend death. THE UNBEARABLE HEART is the winner of a 1996 American Book Award.