In Brine Orchid, an extraordinary book where the mythic can become personal and the personal becomes mythic, a speaker tells us, “You’ve heard the heartbeat of the planet’s oldest / song, the blue press of an unbearably / vast embrace. Anything could lurk below;” and Arah Ko is a poet adept at bringing whatever lurks below—terrible or marvelous—to the surface of each shimmering poem. Whether attempting to breathe life into a wounded bird, reimagining Hansel and Gretel, or excavating the secrets of familial histories, these poems excavate and illuminate their brilliant materials with grace and precision.
—Matthew Olzmann
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
In Arah Ko’s hands, poems are exquisite florals that dazzle, and these blooms have bite. Brine Orchid documents those “woundings” which were “witnessless”: a grandfather’s drunken breath as he beats his wife, racial aggressions against a father after he emigrates from Korea, a mother’s mastitis which leaves her newborn hungry. This arrangement interweaves Western and Eastern mythology, Biblical narratives, and European and Korean tales with multigenerational history to study the legacies of war, violence, and political upheaval. Ko traces bloodlines and “wine / -colored bruises” in a lyric simultaneously blunt in truth and slippery like glass eels, or an unfolding bolt of silk. Ko writes, “I have decided to be happy / in spite of everything that came before // and because of it”—and I’m in sheer awe at this determined wisdom.
—Diana Khoi Nguyen
BRINE ORCHID
FORTHCOMING 2025 - YESYES BOOKS
My debut full-length poetry collection, BRINE ORCHID, was written over seven years and traces lineage - mythic, familial, and spiritual - through time, immigration, faith, and story. The collection is forthcoming with YesYes Books in December 2025.
