Mosquito and Ant (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Kimiko Hahn
- First Published: 1999
- Type of Work: Women’s issues
- Time of Work: The 1990’s
- Setting: A city in the eastern United States (similar to New York) and a city in the western United States (similar to San Francisco)
- Principal Characters: M, L
- Genres: Short fiction
- Subjects: Mothers, Parents and children, Communication, Poetry or poets, Feminism, Women’s issues, Death or dying, Colleges or universities, 1990’s, Asian Americans, Career women
- Locales: East (U.S.), West (U.S.)
In addition to being the author of half a dozen remarkable books of poetry, Kimiko Hahn is a scholar of East Asian languages and literature, and she elucidates the tide of her present collection of poems by noting that “Mosquito and ant’ refers to . . . nu shu . . . a now nearly extinct script used by Chinese women to correspond with one another.” Beyond this allusion to an Asian feminist practice dating from the tenth century, the title poem of Hahn’s book also suggests that the qualities she wants for her writing are the “tenacity not seduction” of ants and the...
[The entire page is 2131 words long]
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