The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems - Hardcover

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 the Poetry of Kimiko Hahn

"One of the most fascinating female poets of our time."
-- BOMB

"A word for Hahn need not simply encompass two meanings; it can bloom into a many-petalled thing. [Like Dickinson's explosive verses], the closer you get to Hahn's wry verses, the more they are likely to blow you away."
-- Alicia Ostriker, poet, critic, and activist, from American Book Review

"Kimiko Hahn moves through the rooms of the mind with an oneiric weightlessness. . . . [Her work is] 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, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and memoirist

"Rigorous intelligence, fierce anger, and finally a deep vulnerability inform [Kimiko Hahn's] poems."
-- Mark Doty, National Book Award-winning poet