The Unbearable Heart

by Kimiko Hahn

From Kimiko Hahn, the celebrated poet of Earshot , The Unbearable Heart is a superbly composed and passionate book on grief and mourning. The poems are both formally innovative and openly cathartic, individually and collectively compelling, turning on their own axis as they revolve around one another. They span languages, landscapes cultures and perspectives. In The Unbearable Heart , Hahn examines the everchanging meaning of surviving the death of a loved one. This collection is a palpable moving mediation on life, death and their aftermath.

Genres: Poetry, Asian American

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 1995

About the author

Kimiko Hahn is the author of seven poetry collections. The Unbearable Heart won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. She has received numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. She teaches at Queens College/The City University of New York.

Reviews

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transcendental.

[EIJANDOLUM · Rating 2 out of 5]

A document every-day life, with its intricacies & volatile moods.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

(On the upper end of three stars)

The Unbearable Heart is a semi-narrative of loss, a series of poems that all connect in one way or another to the death of Hahn's mother in a car accident. These poems range from somewhat less than compelling to absolutely fascinating, particularly as Hahn experiments with form throughout the collection. I particularly liked the second portion of the collection--the poems from "The Flooding" on where she generally does more with formal work and her series of fables from "The Crab" to "The Old Woman's Breast" were also very interesting. The best poems in the collection were smart and a little bit off-kilter, some of them bearing distinct tones of disturbance. This is particularly true of "The Hemisphere: Kuchuk Hanem" a gorgeous prose poem that pulls bits from Flaubert in Egypt and Edward Said's Orientalism and is unafraid to launch salvos of violence and sexuality into the poem

Maybe I want a penis. Maybe that's why I love siting on an outstretched man and, his prick between my legs, rubbing it as if it were mine. Maybe that's why I love to put a cock in my mouth, feel it increase in size with each stroke, each lick, each pulse. Taste the Red Sea. Look over or up and see the man barely able to contain himself, pulling on my nipples or burying a ongue into my Persian Gulf. Also barely able to contain my own sluice. Maybe it's a way to posess a cock. For a moment feel hegemonic and Western.

I have an addiction to silk and chocolate--gold a little. But coins are a necessity. Now chocolates--if there's a plate of chocolate I cannot stop my hand. I tell the Nubian to take it to the kitchen and store it in a cool place. I will sniff it out. Find her fingerprints on the sweaty sweets.

We both use our mouths, professionally

"My heart begins to pound everytime I see [a prostitute] in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as monks in their corded robes have always excited some deep ascetic corner of my soul . . ."

Maybe it's my way to possess a cock. For a moment feel hegemonic and Western.

(The quote is from Flaubert and should be indented further to stay true to Hahn's formatting). I am easily startled by sexual explicitness, but this does not frighten so much as provide a window into the position of the sexually oppressed, making the poem incredibly powerful as it veers from Flaubert to theory to memories of Hahn's mother in the bathtub. The best poems are beautiful and elegant and painful, but the collection only garners three stars due to its weak opening--primarily a problem due to the close interconnectedness of the pieces that make up the book. "Cuttings" and "Wisteria" were also fascinating and powerful poems that perform interesting formal actions. "Cuttings" straddles the line between the prose poem and the brief personal essay in a Japanese form transliterated as zuihitsu, while "Wisteria" is unafraid to break up its internal logic with lines like " 'Father we have lost mother.' / QUILT / he found words when nothing else in the world / served him. Not his legitimate or illegitimate children." Hahn's blending of formally adventurous lyric and straightforward narrative makes for a compelling and enjoyable book, in spite of its weak opening.

[Christina M Rau · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Unbearable Heart is an homage to Hahn's mother, who, and I'm gathering this information from the poems, was killed in a car accident. The poems offer insight into how a daughter deals with her mom's sudden death, how a daughter deals with her own daughters when their grandmother is gone, and how a daughter deals with a father who was not killed alongside his wife. Each poem in some way associates with this central crisis even though it doesn't come up in every poem.

The lines tell a story. Hahn follows the Japanese tradition of storytelling. Her poems wind through traditions, customs, and Japanese rituals and references. They also are worldly in their sorrow and loss. However, she never becomes too sentimental, never weeps openly. She only opens up an intricate world of coping.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

This just was not for me.