Earshot

by Kimiko Hahn

Poetry. Asian-American Studies. Kimiko Hahn's first poetry collection, Air Pocket, served notice that an important new voice was making itself heard. EARSHOT, Hahn's second book, picks up where Air Pocket left off. Jessica Hagedorn writes that Hahn's latest work is "[a] sensual maze of language and startling imagery.Hahn's poetry intoxicates you with her sexual passion, her rigorous intelligence, and the luminous quality of her writing." Jack Hirschman comments that "Hahn's new collection, even more concentrated in content than Air Pocket, covers all from first, to the keystone, to the dialectical hot corner to home. Kisses pumped up from the left ventricle." Kimiko Hahn grew up near New York City and now lives in Manhattan with her husband, Ted Hannan, and their two daughters, Miyako and Reiko. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she currently teaches poetry writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Asian-Americ

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

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

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earshot is Ms. Hahn second collection (1992). There have been several since, cementing the reputation she began building with this and her first collection, Air Pocket. These are American poems: first generation immigrant family poems, love poems, political poems, parental poems (child side/parent side) and literary poems, connecting the author’s work to a tradition that reaches back in time and across continents.

“From Sei Shonagon
we know one can travel in dreams.
The difference between the dreamer
and the dream traveler noted in
a broken twig, footprints in the garden,
or the doormat muddy and askew.
Yes.
Any effort at love
resolved itself in fucking and crying.
I imagine you turning away on your Harley
toward the urban blight.”

In a poem called “The Older Child,” she writes:

“What will become her earliest memory—
the sperm whale battling the giant squid
in the dark exhibition at the museum?
looking up at 3 am
to see her sister pressed against two white breasts?
or maybe her yellow room
filled with the sound of boys in the vacant lot:
bang, boom-boom, fuckyoufuckyoufuck you.”

The poems are personal, direct, fluid in jumping from image or topic to its mate in another realm of experience, in confronting the reader with mystery and polemical fact. When The New York Times describes a dead AIDS activist as having no survivors, Hahn concludes her elegy for him:

“But know this, readers of The New York Times:
there are survivors, even beyond his lover,
even beyond those who praise or damn his work.
I turn the radio on full blast
needing for music to consume the air.
My daughters twirl across the carpet
and I see, Gregory, beloved of Bruce,
partisan blossoms in spite of the blizzard.”

I am pleased that in my To Read stacks are two or more volumes of Kimiko Hahn.