Foreign Bodies: Poems

by Kimiko Hahn

A NPR Best Book of 2020

Inspired by her encounter with Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of ingested curiosities at Philadelphia’s Mütter 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 jewelry.


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, fossilized 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.

Genres: Poetry, Japanese Literature, Contemporary, Asia, Womens, Japan

128 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2020

About the author

Kimiko Hahn is the author of seven poetry collections. The Unbearable Heart won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. She has received numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award. She teaches at Queens College/The City University of New York.

Reviews

[Briana · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I get older, I become more of a poetry enjoyer even though I don’t think I understand it in a way that poets and scholars understand it. I like the way poetry makes me feel when reading it and I see it as another way to tell a story besides prose form. Foreign Bodies by Kimiko Hahn is a collection that snuck up on me. As I face a bit of a creative slump along with a move to New York City, I needed a way to calm my mind. Foreign Bodies embodies the lyrical structure of Japanese tanka and expand on themes like an immigrant woman’s trafficked body, the family home, her Japanese grandmother’s jewelry, grief, and the ephemeral nature of the natural world. The words come alive on the pages and it’s as if this collection of poetry is living and breathing. I think that’s how poetry should make people feel when they read it. I had a great time with it and I was happy to read something that was engaging and mysterious.

[Kerri Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

2023 reread of what's quickly become one of my favorite poetry collections. It lives next to my desk forever now.

Original review from May of 2022:

I think one of my favorite parts about poetry collections is they tend to find you [or me, as it were] at exactly the precise moment you need them.

That was certainly true of this beautiful, unexpected book of poems.

So many of Hahn's poems felt more visceral to me than most of the stories I read all year.

Are some of them bizarre? Undoubtedly. I love that.

More than strange I found these poems stunning, memorable, tangible. Necessary.
Like all good poems should be.

[Five stars for being an instantly beloved collection that now lives with other favorites next to my desk.]

[Maddie Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just like old classic pretty poetry more

[Sarah Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with these poems, I'm going to have to try this book again and see if it works after a reread.

[Christina Wang · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really appreciate the sources of inspiration behind "Foreign Bodies". However, I found this book extremely confusing to read. (This might be a collection for more advanced poetry readers than me.) I understand the general storyline of the collection -- cleaning out a father's house after he's hoarded many objects to cope with his wife's death -- but I was pretty lost beyond that. Two poems I did enjoy were "After Words for Ava" and "Foreign Body". I thought both pieces did an excellent job of interrogating and expanding the definition of a "foreign body." I also will say that I loved the craft essay that Hahn included at the end of the book. The essay definitely shed some insight into how Hahn approaches her poetry, but overall, I still found myself very confused by the poems in the collection.

[birdbassador · Rating 3 out of 5]

while i appreciate the meditations on loss and grief etc., i can't help but be a little peeved that only some of the poems are about medical oddities instead of, as i had hoped, all of them.

[Sonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked some of these, but the collection was a bit hit or miss for me? I felt like I wasn't quite smart enough to get these, and for me, anyway, poetry is so much more about how words make you feel than what they make you think. But ymmv.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

captured perfectly the hollow, nostalgic melancholy of returning to a home you don’t belong to anymore

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

For sure, Hahn's superpower is the symbol. This way her long poems open with a seemingly innocent description, like in this book, the poem "Object Lessons," about the doctor who would remove objects from children and then save them. For what? Or, as that particular poem hints at, why wouldn't you? The precious perspective of children, the memory of things, how they stay with you. These lost objects are the symbol that carry throughout the book.

They become a poetic vocabulary, which is maybe what a symbol is. But Hahn's symbols are different. They're like the furniture in a formal living room. They're there. They're useful. But they're kind of off to the side. You come to them when later poems imply it would be useful to visit with those symbols. Part of this is me saying I'm not a big fan of poems that show too much interest in symbolic significance. Like the poems by Philip Lamantia, who I think I should like. But his symbols get overly weighted with intention. His symbols are so pushy. They have such a hard edge to them. What I like about Hahn's symbols are their long game. Yes, I read "Object Lessons" anticipating the significance of these objects children have ingested. But I've learned over time reading Hahn, the initial introduction is an opening gambit. There will be more. Her symbols accumulate resonance over the span of a longer poem's sections or the span of the entire book.

And ultimately I come to see the paradox of an object. The sadness that there aren't enough objects to remember the mother. But there will never be enough objects, as the father's hoarding touches on. All of these are operating (for my reading) in that poetic vocabulary. And it's what I appreciate so much in Hahn's poems.

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The nautilus, altering little from its Cambrian form
jubilantly paddles about
by drawing water with a siphon
in and out of her living chamber;

then jet-propelling, adjusting buoyancy, and diffusing salt,
she whirls along sand and rock. Unknowingly

my beloved gave me such a shell—
an endangered thing
as well as a house that holds a mother.

I love that this mollusk,
coupling, spawning just once a year

and whose eggs take nearly as long to hatch—I
love that ancient Greeks named her nautilus

ναυτίλος ‘sailor’

believing she—or he—used two expanded arms as sails.
In my mind, crucifix or a child’s snow angel.

Since the opalescent inner shell

passes as a pearl,
escalating its own slaughter,

my cabinet is no longer curious:

now, I’m satisfied with a hornet’s nest from the backyard,

snake skin found on a footpath,
coil of whelk cases from the local beach,

and, also from the beach, a stone in the shape of Jizo,

so like the statue we saw in Shibuya,
bobby pins clipped to its red bib.”

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautifully and intricately structured book. It dwells on how objects tell the stories of our lives, our bodies, or families, and our culture. There is a string of repetitions threaded throughout the poems tying the collection together, as well as a series of short charm poems, as if dangling from a thread interspersed throughout the collection as well.We get a doctor’s report of the foreign objects people have in their bodies, memories of a father and a car accident, a female scientists collecting fossils, as well as other stories all told in innovative longer poems constructed of short sections, often with an envoy at the end constructed from lines from the body of the poem, as if they were objects collected from it. All of this in beautiful emotion-charged images and language. There is also an essay on Japanese poetics as an afterward that is a little masterpiece in itself. This is a collection that will repay close study.

[Kelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

“with or without a charm
a little girl can fashion a mirror of her own” (70)

This collection is a fascinating meditation on the seemingly innocuous detritus of our lives. Some curios we swallow like children and others we place on pedestals. Sometimes an object gets lodged in our brains forever and sometimes we realize we’ve blocked out an object that had more meaning than we knew at the time.

Definitely an interesting read~

[Harry Palacio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foreign Bodies by Kimiko Hahn is a poetry collection of the body: where translations of family archetypes and language is a typeface for the interlocutor. This work has poetics that transitions from the Japanese and literal and poetic translation using space and form to inform the reader of migratory family co-habitation and family memory. Inside this volume is a kaleidoscope of places; where a backdrop is a achieved in a cadence through the practice of retrieving working memory.

[Mitzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed several of these poems as meditations of what "foreign bodies" are. Some of them revolved around things people have swallowed, the life of one of the first female paleontologists, what it means to be an immigrant. I recommend you turn to the end of the book to read the method of her poetry and also some background to some of the subjects of the poems first so that you can appreciate the poems better.

[Stephanie M. Wytovich]

I picked this up at @wickedgoodbooks last week and read it slowly throughout my trip. When I saw that the collection was inspired by Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of ingested curiosities at the Mutter Museum (one of my favorite places to visit) it was an automatic buy for me.

These poems are experimental and raw and take you on a journey of digestible truths and fears and realities. It’s a great brain exercise and I recommend it if you’re a reader and lover of poetry.

[Dora Prieto · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Whether Astoria, Corona, Ozone Park—
my students living three generations under one roof
know better than I that only Death can
Rub away the Brand—"

Such a beautiful, generous, and instructive collection. It took me about 20 pages to get into it because of the oblique-ness but the reward was nuanced, deep, cutting, and full of entry points.

[Hikari Miya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid, reverent, and striking poems with "object" and "dead mother" as themes. I really appreciate how Hahn includes an essay at the end about turning point words in Japanese as well as parataxis; it's very well versed!

[Bea]

April 2021 review: DNF

Honestly, I just read a portion of the first poem and it didn't really resonate with me. Then again, this is a concept collection and I haven't read Kimiko Hahn in the past. I think I'll read some individual poems and then decide if I want to come back to this.

[Hannah Siem · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first poetry book, picked quite a difficult one lol. There was a chapter about the formatting of Hahn's poems which I found interesting but kind of broke the flow of the book for me. "charms iii" and "Divine" stuck out to me a lot, and I ended up going back to them after I finished reading.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hahn's collection is built on the small objects of life and builds conceits about relationship between experience and objects in life. Hahn employs a variety of forms for this and her gift for imagery also shows through here.

[Jenn Kause · Rating 3 out of 5]

Granted I haven’t read a lot of poetry since high school so this is just me- but I didn’t understand a good amount. The portions I did it was deep and meaningful, but otherwise I personally felt disconnected to it.

[Jack Bentele]

“Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight
to see my mama
moting around as sympathetic ash.
Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow
I’ll be soot with her—

elegiac and original.”

—

“In my mind, an alloy is ultimately practical because, as you commented, to be hybrid anticipates the future.”

[michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 / 5

[Jennie Canzoneri]

(ebook, library)

[silas denver melvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

a high 3

[Kasey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in City Lights
I liked her afterword explaining some of the poems and kakekotoba

[Lily Poppen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full collection could benefit from the essay prefacing the fragmented poems to ground rather than fully disjoint

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review in progress.

[Ryan Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Image rich spiral through grief and aging

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

august 2023 poetry challenge day 17. i love object lessons.