Allow me to introduce Arah Ko, a poet, writer, teacher, and editor originally from the Big Island of Hawai’i. Growing up in Hawai’i, surrounded by books and jungle, Arah found inspiration in the diverse ecologies and mythological narratives of the islands, her Korean-American heritage, and the traditional fairytales and folklore that continue to inspire her work. Arah’s poetry and prose chart the intersections of structural forces (colonialism, climate change, patriarchy) with the personal (family, history, memory), drawing from intellectual-poetic lineages in the work of Emily Dickinson, Layli Long Soldier, Imani Cezanne, and others.
Arah has two books on the way: her debut, full-length poetry collection, Brine Orchid (Yes Yes Books, 2025), which investigates inheritance, heritage, and myth, and her chapbook Animal Logic (Bull City Press, 2026), which explores themes of survival and consumption through the lens of flora and fauna.
This fall, Arah and I met over Zoom to talk about her work. We discussed how she imagines poetry’s importance in our present moment, what new poetic forms she’s exploring, the poets who shape her creative practice, and what might come next in her work.
Olivia Stowell: Could you introduce yourself in your own words?
Arah Ko: I’m Arah Ko. I’m a writer originally from the Big Island of Hawai’i. I also work in teaching, and in editing and other publishing spheres. I got my MFA from Ohio State University and I’m currently working on my PhD in creative writing with a focus on poetry at the University of Cincinnati.
OS: In your poetry, you use myths, folklore, and family stories – it seems like you’re interested in how narratives can be both controlling and freeing, just as a poetic image is multifaceted. Can you elaborate more on that?
AK: Absolutely. Poetry is a subversive genre. It pushes against the boundaries of how we think about things and perform things. Part of this has to do with the form: the poem is breaking the line. You’re visually following a poem down the page in places that you wouldn’t normally be moving down. So it’s forcing you to physically follow the words in a new way. It’s an expressive way to push against boundaries.
OS: What are the boundaries or conditions that give rise to the forms you’re playing with in your work now?
AK: Last week was one-year anniversary of October 7th and the intensification of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Last year I was so frustrated being in my insular, small community in rural Hawai’i and feeling like I had no input on the world around me. As a writer and an academic, I’m uniquely privileged because I get to write into the world, and I get to observe it in ways and with resources that a lot of people are not afforded. But then I am always struggling with this feeling of am I making anything substantial in the world?
There’s a reason we use poems to elegize, to write love poems. Poems are able to encapsulate feelings that can’t be expressed in any other way. I started moving towards these forms because it’s not always sufficient to use a graceful form or complete form to talk about things that are fractured or broken.
In our lives today, we’re always trying to archive things—we’re inundated with information from social media that we can’t escape. You’re trying to figure out what to preserve, what you have to learn, what you have to keep and leave behind. And lists and lists and lists came up for me.
OS: This makes me think about your list poem “Afterlife Inventory.” There’s a moment at the end where you write “every song you learned all / the bombs dropped on your behalf.” That kind of juxtaposition—between something as mundane as our favorite songs and the weight of bombs dropped on our behalf—so evocatively gets at what you can keep, what you can leave behind, what you hold on to. How do you create these relationships between images?
AK: Yes! I’m constantly questioning the relationship between images and complicating my preconceptions about those relationships. I love how poetry problematizes our assumptions and opens meaning up to be more expansive than we might initially assume. “Afterlife Inventory” is not just a list, but an accounting of things that you realize you can’t bring into the afterlife.
I’m inspired by Paula Harris, who wrote a piece called “you will dig me from the earth with your bare hands, in order to resurrect me.” It’s a list of these fantastical, mystic things that the reader of the poem is doing in order to resurrect the speaker, but at the end of the poem, it says: “and all of this will be too late.” Paula Harris passed away a few years ago, and it’s still a looming shadow over me to think about her words in that way.
I wrote a poem in the Cincinnati Review called “The Father.” It’s about tragic dad lore—the poem devolves into a list of “I had” statements that you receive from the father:
It’s a long list of “I had” statements, and the devastating part of the list becomes the fact that it’s in the past tense. It ends with: “I had to leave behind the dead / I had you.” The father is speaking to the speaker of the poem, and it’s still in the past tense.
Marie Howe said poetry can’t be summarized or reduced. And I think that’s such a helpful rule of thumb, because it’s so difficult to encapsulate or summarize or articulate—or even review!—poetry. It’s impossible to substitute the poem with anything else. Those relationships between the words and the language: the associations are already in their most distilled form.
OS: Speaking of substituting, I want you to talk a little bit about your poem “Sorry I Didn’t Call You Back,” where you have a fill-in-the-blank structure and a word bank, in which different combinations of words can be substituted.
AK: Yes, absolutely. I’m really inspired by poets like Imani Cezanne. Her poem “Fill in the Blanks” has all these blank spaces which could be read as absence. The absence of the Black woman, the absence of the trans woman, the absence of the woman of color. Discussing these political positions within the poem is devastating because there is literally no word that can be placed there—the absence of even the word that stands in place of the overlooked body.
I actually started writing fill in the blank poems because I was on an airplane and I forgot a word. I said, Okay, I’ll just mark the empty space with an underline, and I’ll come back and I’ll fill it in when I have wi-fi and I can actually find the correct word.
I kept writing, and I reached another point where I wasn’t sure what word I wanted to use, so I saved it for later. I kept doing that, and by the time I got to the end, I realized that this was a better version of the poem, because it was so open. The absence of the word speaks for itself.
To get from the fill-in-the blanks idea to the word bank, I thought about venery terms—like “a murder of crows”—and how that wordplay gives communities of species a different atmosphere and tone through language. The words used for the groups of animals could so easily be swapped with each other linguistically—what if it was a school of crows and a murder of fish?—and how that re-stranging of language could be alarming and beautiful at the same time. So I started to think: what if you could put in any term you wanted from a bank into the blank, and recreate that re-stranging in the poem? These poems—ones that can be read in multiple directions, similar to erasure poetry—haunt me.
OS: I’m thinking about Solmaz Sharif’s “Reaching Guantánamo” as well—where censorship by the state is the hand of erasure, which is distinct from thinking about the poet’s hand as the hand of erasure. Whereas in your fill-in-the-blanks poems, which have word banks, the gesture is not the same as erasure, right? Because inside each blank there’s multiplicity.
AK: Yes, it’s a relative of erasure where you’re relying on, at least for me, a subconscious memory of Mad Libs. The onus is on the reader to complete the poem in the same way the onus is on the reader to read and then interpret the poem. So you get to fill in the blank, and sometimes filling in the blank with the absence of a word, a pause, a silence, is just as powerful. What isn’t there? What couldn’t be expressed, what aren’t you allowed to say? I think the form is inherently political, maybe not quite as much as erasure as a form.
It’s a little bit related to a form called contrapuntal, where you can read a poem in multiple directions. One of my favorite contrapuntal poets is Layli Long Soldier, who wrote “Obligations 1” and “Obligations 2.” You can read these poems in different configurations, which in turn creates many new poems, but it’s also static on the page where you can see the diamond shape of the poem. I think that’s part of the fill-in-the-blank poems, too. There are many different poems depending on what you read into the blanks, but you’re also questioning if anything should go in them at all.
OS: So these contrapuntal poems are in some ways never fully “finished” or cemented. But how do you know when a poem is ready for someone else? How do you know that you said what you wanted to say—when the question has been asked in the way you meant to ask it?
AK: Was it Da Vinci or Michelangelo who said “Art is never finished, only abandoned”? I think you have to work on it as much as you can, and then, at a certain point, you have to move on.
In my own work I don’t feel like my pieces are complete until they’ve been read. It’s a conversation. The poem should be out in the world. It should be disagreed with, agreed with, resonated with, misinterpreted—maybe interpreted better—because of that.
So I’m not going to pretend that I have the ultimate interpretation. I hope that instead, I’m offering a good question to consider.
OS: Thinking about what needs to be heard right now, I would love to hear you talk about the importance of animals as recurring symbols in your poetry—especially for your upcoming chapbook Animal Logic.
AK: A lot of what I’m interested in in the poems is showing the many different faces of the image. I love poetry because an image is always more than the thing itself.
That’s what I was interested in with Animal Logic—this mything of the stories that we tell each other, the beliefs that we hold so close, and how that overlays or superimposes on our real lives. I’m always playing with that multifaceted nature of image. I’m also interested in how other poets do this. Emily Dickinson has a super strong relationship to the bee—a bee means something very specific to Dickinson and her poems that it might not mean for any other poet.
Similarly, for me, the fox means something that it might not mean for any other poet. There is a long East Asian tradition of the myths of the fox, which is often associated with a feminine, wily character that’s sometimes pseudo-demonic, yet also respected for its cleverness. And that became my nickname from the Korean side of my family, which felt like a sly double-edged sword, because it doesn’t always have a positive association—we’re talking about the emotional associations that we humans have towards animal images. So I decided to reclaim that image in my own work.
OS: I want to hear you say more about what your craft process is like.
AK: Craft is hard. I’ve been interested in writing by hand recently, as a way of making myself go outside of my comfort space. When I wrote parts of Animal Logic by hand at first, I was constrained by the size of the notebook I had. I was constrained by how tired my hand got. And I was writing in a form—prose poems—that I didn’t think I was very good at, at the time, because I rely so much on enjambs. I love enjambment! Line breaks are so beautiful to me. So I was stretching towards an area of poetry that I just don’t feel as strong in.
That was a very rewarding experience, because I got to kind of heal some of those gaps in my own knowledge of poetry. Now I’m trying to expand again. I’m playing with the field of the page more. I am interested in disobeying linearity. What can it look like in that fuzzy space between visual art and written word?
OS: You anticipated what I was going to ask next, which is, what do you think is next for you?
AK: I think what I’ve realized is that there are some topics that you never move on from as a writer or a scholar. My collection Brine Orchid is about family and becoming and heritage, and how those interface with the folklore that we receive as children. I thought that I was done telling those family stories when I finished writing it, but these ideas keep cropping up again for me, and I’m realizing that I might never be done telling them.
They’re never going to be any less relevant to my life, so I’m coming to terms with the fact that I might be rewriting similar stories over and over again. And that might be okay. You know better what you’re saying or what you’re erasing if it’s related to the stories that you own.
Arah Ko is a writer from Hawai’i and the author of Brine Orchid (YesYes Books 2025) and the chapbook Animal Logic (Bull City Press 2026). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Anthology, Best of Net, and Best New Poets and is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
Olivia Stowell is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, where she researches race and labor in contemporary television and popular culture. Her current obsessions are Jon Fosse’s Septology, the new holiday episodes of Beat Bobby Flay, and Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky.”
Allow Me to Introduce is our recurring feature that makes space for authors to elevate, punctuate, and nuance our reception of the work of artists, writers, and scholars that are worthy of our attention but otherwise underdiscussed. Authors might introduce readers to new works or forthcoming publications, lesser noted themes across an artist’s body of work, or work that emerges form niche and sub-cultural fields that might otherwise escape our attention. This feature can take the form of either an essay about the artist/work or an interview with the artist/writer.
This interview has been edited for clarity.