Overview

Full Product Details

9781946303103

Table of Contents

Reviews

In Arah Ko's hands, poems are exquisite florals that dazzle, and these blooms have bite. Brine Orchid documents those ""woundings"" which were ""witnessless"" a grandfather's drunken breath as he beats his wife, racial aggressions against a father after he emigrates from Korea, a mother's mastitis which leaves her newborn hungry. This arrangement interweaves Western and Eastern mythology, Biblical narratives, and European and Korean tales with multigenerational history to study the legacies of war, violence, and political upheaval. Ko traces bloodlines and ""wine / -colored bruises"" in a lyric simultaneously blunt in truth and slippery like glass eels, or an unfolding bolt of silk. Ko writes, ""I have decided to be happy / in spite of everything that came before // and because of it""-and I'm in sheer awe at this determined wisdom. -Diana Khoi Nguyen In Brine Orchid, an extraordinary book where the mythic can become personal and the personal becomes mythic, a speaker tells us, ""You've heard the heartbeat of the planet's oldest / song, the blue press of an unbearably / vast embrace. Anything could lurk below"" and Arah Ko is a poet adept at bringing whatever lurks below-terrible or marvelous-to the surface of each shimmering poem. Whether attempting to breathe life into a wounded bird, reimagining Hansel and Gretel, or excavating the secrets of familial histories, these poems excavate and illuminate their brilliant materials with grace and precision. -Matthew Olzmann

Author Information

A poet, editor, teacher, and fiction writer, ARAH KO is the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and the chapbook Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2026). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, RHINO, Colorado Review, The Threepenny Review, Quarterly West, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She was awarded an Academy of American Poets Arthur Rense Prize, a Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Poetry, and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. Arah hails from Hawai'i. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University in Columbus where she served on the staff of The Journal. She is currently a Ph.D. student at The University of Cincinnati where she also serves on the staff of The Cincinnati Review.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available