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.
