Inspired by her encounter with Dr Chevalier Jackson's collection of ingested curiosities at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum, Kimiko Hahn's tenth collection 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 jewellery.

As Hahn remakes the lyric sequence in chains reminiscent of the Japanese tanka, the foreign bodies of the title expand to include the immigrant woman's trafficked body, fossilised remains, a grandmother's Japanese body. She explores the relationship between our innermost selves and the relics of our vanished past, making room for meditation on grief and the ephemeral nature of the material world, for the account of a nineteenth-century female fossil hunter, and for a celebration of the nautilus. Foreign Bodies investigates the power of possession, replete with Hahn's electric originality and thrilling mastery of ever-changing forms.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"Kimiko Hahn's structurally and formally complex new book, Foreign Bodies, is a long, rich meditation on detail. It is a masterpiece of scale... The book is a series of elegies of the most original and surprising sort. A quite miraculous performance." -- Lynn Emanuel, author of The Nerve of It
"Kimiko Hahn writes with a particular brightness of mind like no one else... Where another poet, doing such inexhaustible research, would eventually clean up her act, Kimiko Hahn in Foreign Bodies makes as much art out of documentary evidence and 'sparkly'" -- David Baker, author of Swift



Book Information
ISBN 9780393882445
Author Kimiko Hahn
Format Paperback
Page Count 128
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 134g
Dimensions(mm) 211mm * 157mm * 10mm