Mosquito and Ant

the long version

Mosquito & Ant refers to the style in which nu shu - a nearly extinct script used by Chinese women to correspond with one another - is written. In this book of poems, the narrator corresponds with L. about her hidden passions, her relationship with her husband and adolescent daughters, lost loves, and erotic fantasies. Borrowing from both Japanese and Chinese traditions, Hahn offers us an authentic and complex narrator struggling with the sorrows and pleasures of being a woman against the backdrop of her Japanese-American roots.