Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover & Interior Design: Olivia Hammerman
Author Photo: Marcus Jackson
$20 | ISBN: 978-1-946303-10-3
Poetry l Perfectbound | December 9, 2025
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
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
Brine Orchid
Available for Preorder now!
About the book
“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.
About the author
A poet, editor, teacher, and fiction writer, ARAH KO is the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and the chapbook Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2026). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, RHINO, Colorado Review, The Threepenny Review, Quarterly West, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She was awarded an Academy of American Poets Arthur Rense Prize, a Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Poetry, and the 2021 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize. Arah hails from Hawai'i. She received her MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University in Columbus where she served on the staff of The Journal. She is currently a Ph.D. student at The University of Cincinnati where she also serves on the staff of The Cincinnati Review.
