The Narrow Road to the Interior: Poems Book

Kimiko Hahn's poems abound with sharp internal dialogues; poems questioning themselves as well as the world around them. And even when it seems like the narrator is definitely in first-person, there is her subtle altering of voice--connected to the
There is a truth-seeking sense of play--not frivolity--in the language she chooses and creates; she takes words, bends them-- wound and wind, detail and derail, teas (the drink) and tease (the action), construct and constrict, egrets turning into regrets. And it never mere wordplay; as she takes words and objects and changes them, she alters both their physical nature, and the poem we are reading, adding layer upon layer of meaning and sensuality--in being tied to our senses--as she does.

Connected to this is her exploring the unpredictable nature of memory, of recalling one thing to have it slip into another, never taking the easy glib route to what is true, always frankly admitting that it may not be a direct line from one's experience of a thing that gets us there, if we get there at all. There is a desire, alive and pulsing, to ponder what has happened, no matter how painful, to discover always more about where we've been, so we can know where we are. In "The Tunnel," it is reflected with the simple line "She wanted to reread Yukiguni in the winter and see if what she had loved she still loved."

There are unusually evocative echoes in many of the poems; for me, hearing a line like "…I ask for a glass of water. He brings a/spare comforter" suggest the blues standard "I Asked for Water, He Gave Me Gasoline." There are lost intimacies, hard questions about what we let go of, how we can let go of things that once were our world, and the aching evocation of what comes after.

Kimiko's poems ask the reader to trust language to reveal, to allow oneself to be pulled farther along, trusting the writer and the work to not let go of us as we plumb hers and our own emotional depths. In Pulse and Impulse, she writes the heartbreaking line "Delicious because it is delicious to realize feelings."