The Ghost Forest Hardcover by Kimiko Hahn

Product Details

• Publisher: WW Norton (2024-10-15)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 368 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781324086062
• Item Weight: 618.03 grams
• Dimensions: 9.28 x 6.21 x 1.06 cm

“Borrowing from [such writers as] Elizabeth Bishop and Chimako Tada, featuring ghosts and geoglyphs, writing in form and free verse, Kimiko Hahn’s broad and eclectic approach reveals a mind as vast as the terrains it traverses.”—Nicole Sealey, Poetry magazine

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.—

 

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.