The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

by Kimiko Hahn (Author)

Opening with forty-three new formally inventive poems and leading the reader back in time through selections from her ten previous volumes, The Ghost Forest offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of a writer's artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating her personal history. Exploring the mysteries of science, nature, and the experiences of contemporary womanhood, Hahn both reinvents classic Japanese forms and experiments with traditional Western ones. Braided into the poems and narrative thread, a series of photos transforms the new-and-selected into a hybrid autobiography. This arresting collection derives new beauty from long-gone remnants.

A Riotous Disorder
She mistakes one word for another--
Something her brain naturally concocts.
Her unruly gray matter and her heart
Mistake one word for an other--
Razor for river, cistern for sister.
Even cock for clock.
She mistakes one word for a mother--
A safe her brain naturally unlocks.--

Back Jacket

Praise for Kimiko Hahn's Work

Foreign Bodies
"'Notice that the simplest often yields the most, ' writes Kimiko Hahn in her electric tenth collection. In Hahn's hands, the smallest of relics become powerful portals through time, space, and memory. With expert lyric sensibility and all the anguish of daughterhood, Foreign Bodies reminds us of the necessity of poetry as a spell for intimacy. It's a spell that offers hope of the most urgent kind: the hope of closing the gap between 'my other's body' and 'my mother's body, ' between ourselves and all that we can't reach."
-- Franny Choi, author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Brain Fever
"In Brain Fever, Kimiko Hahn moves through the rooms of the mind with an oneiric weightlessness. She also touches concrete ground in the realm of neuroscience, and in the world outside the mind, where love, betrayal, regret, and debilitating loss reside. This is a beautiful and troubling book, a marriage of what matters most: the mysteries buried at our very core and the world that cradles and cuts into us at every turn."
-- Tracy K. Smith, 22nd US poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Toxic Flora
"Seeing humanity and the self through the natural world is a common means of exploration for poets, but Hahn's frankness and the strange meat of these poems allows them to stand out as starkly fresh as the carnivorous plants she describes."
-- American Poets

The Narrow Road to the Interior
"What makes Kimiko Hahn's new book so appealing is her ability to transcend the confessional lyric by adapting Japanese poetic expectations and fitting them to her own unique--and very personal--requirements."
-- John Givens, Cerise Press

The Artist's Daughter
"Love and betrayal, hatred and fidelity all combine in these poems which take us into the dark woods of our own psyche."
-- Ai, author of Vice

Mosquito and Ant
"Most impressive about Hahn's poetry is its confidentiality. Reading Mosquito and Ant--the fiery reportage of life's mundane details, daily rituals, likes and dislikes, anxieties and incessant erotic fantasies--we are privy to the most intimate thoughts; the making public of fragments of the unconscious self."
-- Erika Biddle, Bomb

Volatile
"In this book, Kimiko Hahn manages to take the air of atrocity we breathe in daily and turn it into fierce political/lyrical poetry, in the tradition of Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy. Current events ripped open and the entrails exposed in living color. She is one of our strongest poets."
-- Harvey Shapiro, author of The Sights Along the Harbor

The Unbearable Heart
"Reading The Unbearable Heart you have the sense of someone tearing the past apart and rebuilding with naked, raw hands. The work is furious, flawed, and absolutely necessary."
-- Adrienne Rich, author of The Dream of a Common Language

Earshot
"A sensual maze of language and startling imagery...Kimiko Hahn's poetry intoxicates you with her sexual passion, her rigorous intelligence, and the luminous quality of her writing."
-- Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters