Brine Orchid

With depth and precision, Arah Ko’s Brine Orchid leaps from myth to memory, ancestor to sibling, Korea to Hawai’i, and from near extinction to miraculous reappearance. Lyrical and lush, each poem stretches through seas, stories, time, and space to refract the contradictory gift and challenge of inheritance. To whom do we belong? Do we turn toward or against the future calling out for us? Ko compels us to hold each image, creature, and question populating these pages with care and curiosity. A stirring and imaginative debut, Brine Orchid enlightens: ＂we are each complicit in the communion of living.＂

-Sarah Ghazal Ali

＂I have decided to be happy/ in spite of everything that came before, / and because of it,＂ declares the speaker in BRINE ORCHID. Weaving in and out of myth, scripture, and immigrant family lore, the poems in Arah Ko’s spectacular debut create a tribute to Korean diaspora, the inheritance of storytelling, and the enduring survival of lineage that is both searing and tender. The collection traces the contours of Korean American heritage and its intersections with trauma, spirituality, colonialism, food, gender, and the natural world. By calling on figures of the past, these poems are permeated with a sense of absence and questioning both in form and content. While the writer’s immigrant family tends to live in the present as a method of survival, this poetry turns to history in order to mourn loss and wounds, acknowledge change, and celebrate the endurance of familial love and culture.