Mosquito and Ant refers to the style in which nu shu--a nearly extinct script used by Chinese women to correspond with one another--is written. Here in this exciting and totally original 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. Kimiko Hahn's collection takes shape as a series of wide-ranging correspondences that are in turn precocious and wise, angry and wistful. 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.

A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Kimiko Hahn has published more than ten collections on subjects ranging from Asian American identity and zuihitsu to rarified fields of science. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and, most recently, the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She teaches in the MFA program for Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.