Ants competing to win a Chrysler Crossfire Limited, star-crossed ants, freethinking and over-educated ants searching for a better life, pencils filled with crushed ants, ants in your teeth, your heart, running laps across your forehead. These prose poems are vaguely disturbing, really funny, and not so much about ants as about relationships, community, and the extremely low and high stakes of absolutely everything.
— Maslen
Description
Fiction. Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. THE ANTS is a study not of, but through, ants. In a dashing sequence of prose pieces, Sawako Nakayasu takes the human to the level of the ant, and the ant to the level of the human. Prima facie, THE ANTS is a catalogue of insect observations and observations of insects. But the expos of insect life humbles and disrupts the myopia that is human life, where experience is seen in its most raw and animal form and human nouveau- ambitious and free-thinking lifestyles become estranged, uncovered, and humbled. Found in the soups of dumplings and remembered in childhood vignettes, these ants trail through what Nayayasu writes as the industry of survival, exploring interfaces of love, ambition, and strategy. The danger is not in sentiment, but rather, in a gash, a wall, an argument, an intention. Is it more lonely to be crushed into the core of a non- mechanical pencil, to be isolated in the safety of home, or to find it all at the very very last moment? THE ANTS is the distance, the break, the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton and endoskeleton, and Nakayasu puts her finger on it, and it, and it.
