2020
I think I saw Foreign Bodies on a list of the best book covers of 2020, of all places, but the description sounded interesting (and accidentally very relevant for the first year of the pandemic,) so I found a copy, along with another book of Hahn's poetry I'll read later in the month.
The poem that inspired the book's cover art, and that gets mentioned in the jacket copy, is based on Hahn viewing a museum's wunderkammer that housed a collection of objects children swallowed that were retrieved from their bodies by the doctor who invented the endoscope.
Much more of the book however, is devoted to Hahn thinking about her father who died recently, and her mother who died longer ago. Her father was a hoarder, and she likens his house to a museum's cabinet of curiosities. Among the things lost in there, somewhere, are her mother's ashes. Hahn also reflects on her grandmother's internment as a Japaense woman in the US, and, if I understood correctly, on a miscarriage she had years earlier.
So it's a pretty elagaic collection.
I don't read a lot of poetry, and I don't think I really know how to judge it. If these were just essays, I would say that Hahn draws interesting parallels between a museum exhibit of swallowed junk, her father's hoards, and the few treasured possessions from her mother she keeps in a safety deposit box.
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