Ode to Whitman’s “They do not think whom they souse with spray”; Ode to Tennyson’s “Some one had blunder’d”; Ode to Frost’s “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

Kimiko Hahn, author of nine books, finds that disparate sources have influenced her work—among them black lung disease, Flaubert’s sex tour, exhumation, and classical Japanese literary/poetic forms. Rarified fields of science prompted her latest poetry collections, Toxic Flora (2010) and Brain Fever (2014), both from W. W. Norton. A new collection, Foreign Bodies, is forthcoming in 2020. Hahn’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Shelley Memorial Award. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.