Two Poets on Curiosities and Consciousness

Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten collections of poems including: Brain Fever, and Toxic Flora, both collections prompted by science; The Narrow Road to the Interior, a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; and The Unbearable Heart, which received an American Book Award. She has added chapbooks to her list of publications, including Write it!, Brittle Process, Brood, Ragged Evidence, A Field Guide to the Intractable, Boxes with Respect, The Cryptic Chamber, Resplendent Slug and, with Tamiko Beyer, Dovetail. Inspired by her encounter with Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of ingested curiosities at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, Kimiko Hahn’s tenth collection, Foreign Bodies (W.W.Norton), investigates the grip that seemingly insignificant objects exert on our lives. Itself a cabinet of curiosities, the collection provokes the same surprise, wonder, and pangs of recognition Hahn felt upon opening drawer after drawer of these swallowed, and retrieved, objects—a radiator key, a child’s perfect attendance pin, a mother-of-pearl button. The speaker of these moving poems sees reflections of these items in the heartbreaking detritus of her family home, and in her long-dead mother’s Japanese jewelry. The foreign bodies of the title expand to include the immigrant woman’s trafficked body, fossilized remains, a grandmother’s Japanese body. In ever-changing forms, the poems of Foreign Bodies investigate the power of possession. Franny Choi, author of Soft Science, quotes Hahn (‘Notice that the simplest often yields the most’) to marvel at how “In Hahn’s hands, the smallest of relics become powerful portals through time, space,

Rosanna Warren is the author of Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, Departure, and Ghost in a Red Hat. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. With irony, in mourning tinged with eros, Rosanna Warren blends the personal and the political to meditate on damage, aging, and injustice. The poems in So Forth (W. W. Norton & Company) surge back in memory, pondering guilt and forgiveness. Consciousness flows from singular to plural. Identity in these poems does a round dance with other personae. In response to griefs both historical and contemporary, So Forth contemplates the quest for the holy and traditions of the sacred. Katie Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News, praised it as ” a book of love and war, rich with poems of desire and rage, situated in our nearly unbearable historical moment, alive to its challenges and pleasures. Rosanna Warren uses passion and calculation in equal measure to grapple with an uncertain future.”