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The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn, Norton, 2006, $23.95 cloth, ISBN 9780393061895.
Kimiko Harm's seventh collection opens with an epistolary poem, "Compass," in which the writer attempts to establish a working definition of zuihitsu, one of the Japanese genres that guides Hahn's prose poems here and elsewhere. She argues that none of the existing definitions concedes "that a sense of disorder might be artfully ordered by fragmenting, juxtaposing, contradicting, varying length or-even within a piece-topic." It is this order within disorder Hahn seeks in her own work here, a desire that emerges first as a nostalgically modernist impulse to recover a lost whole. The idea of the fragment-that it "might be synecdoche, or excerpt. Or scrap"-finally evolves in this poem into a rhetorical question: "when is a piece that resembles a fragment-really the whole?"
Hahn's project indirectly aligns itself with Ann Lauterbach's poetics of the whole fragment. Her fragments are composed of the ephemera of everyday life, consisting of pieces of letters, e-mail messages, interviews, diary entries, and other forms of correspondence with the self and others-what she calls, in "The Orient," "those 'grade B'...