BRINE ORCHID

“An extraordinary book where the mythic can become personal and the personal becomes mythic…”

—MATTHEW OLZMANN, author of Constellation Route

WINNER, 2026 Ohio Book Award

Finalist, 2025 Big Other Book Award in Poetry

Co-Winner, 2025 Julie Suk Award

Praise for ANIMAL LOGIC:

A hunger exists in Animal Logic—to honor our animalness is to find our wildness, our instinctual connectivity to the world— an urge to fight for the various layers of the sacred.

—Felicia Zamora, Author of I Always Carry My Bones

Arah Ko’s restless forms dazzle with inventiveness and unrelenting ferocity. ‘There is an animal inside each / of us, or there should be,’ she writes, redefining the distinctions between human and animal life forms, as well as the language by which we understand our own embodiment—the body’s flesh and stink; its animal hungers, rot and remains.

—Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Author of Mothersalt

about

Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai'i with work published in over 60 journals.

 She is the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025), winner of the 2026 Ohio Book Award for Poetry and co-winner of the 2025 Julie Suk Award, and the chapbook Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2026). Arah received her M.F.A. in creative writing at the Ohio State University in Columbus in 2023 where she served as Art, Wheeler Prize, and Associate Poetry Editor for The Journal. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Cincinnati and serves as an editorial assistant for The Cincinnati Review.

Photograph by Marcus Jackson

“The poems in this manuscript grapple with the alarming indifference the natural world has toward matters of mortality while at the same time grappling with the subtle traumas and bittersweet truths inherent in family and memory. Loss of various kinds finds a lyrical voice in these poems, as "Around us is a constant / cadence, an ancient clinging, / almost a song," one that rings unmistakably doleful and meditatively in these works.” 

 ― Tory Adkisson, author of The Flesh Between Us