Benjamin Landry Surveys Kimiko Hahn's Brain Fever

Boston Review hosts a swell synopsis by Benjamin Landry of Kimiko Hahn's new venture Brain Fever published later last year by Knopf. Check it:

A characteristically disjunctive turn marks the end of “The Dream of a Raindrop,” from Kimiko Hahn’s latest collection, Brain Fever:

“aggregates of water molecules
that have condensed around specks of dust or salt”—
until gravity has its way
and circle turns into chandelier-crystal:
drizzle, downpour, tempest.
Come inside Kimi, before you catch your death.

The objective language of scientific explanation gives way to subjective rumination, and intellectual fire is replaced by the warmth of kinship. Hahn has been practicing this kind of bouleversement over the course of her previous eight collections, and it now lands with conviction it did not before possess. Most poets are unable to hide their allegiance to their preferred mode: they are confessional or aloof, lyric or mimetic, declamatory or circumspect. But the ease with which Hahn now modulates among modes suggests that she is neither here nor there: she inhabits the atomic spaces within molecules of water as well as the consciousness of the familial relation offstage, calling out to her. It is a display of newfound power that, for its strangeness, is equal parts disconcerting and thrilling.

The poems in Brain Fever were conceived as a string of responses to articles in the New York Times science section. Although each of the eight sections (“consciousness,” “dream,” “time,” “puzzles,” “the teenage brain,” “circle,” “conveying love,” “memory”) has a prevailing formal structure, the conceit never burdens the work—with the possible exception of the blacked-out redactions in “the teenage brain.” Like Toxic Flora (2010), Hahn’s previous book, Brain Fever is a project collection: it is composed with an overarching conceptual basis or methodology that—to some touchier critics—might seem overly predetermined. In the case of Brain Fever, the rigorously limited source material, often incorporated verbatim, constitutes the conceptual constraint. Toxic Flora also gathered its inspiration from the Times science section, but its patently metaphorical use of natural phenomena was often clumsy. The strains of poisoning, invasion, and predation became a one-note commentary on the dangers of parenting. [...]

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