Kimiko Hahn

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, and memory. […] Foreign Bodies reminds us of the necessity of poetry as a spell for intimacy.”