Claire Zhou

Hi Arah! I’ve read both of your poems in Shō No. 4, “Magpie 까치” and “Fiddleback.” I love both of them, and I was just wondering if you could give a brief discussion of how you think your culture and history fit into poems like “Magpie까치”—I noticed that it seems very intertwined with your own background, specifically with your grandmother in “Magpie까치.”

arah ko

Absolutely. Let me see, how’s the best way to approach it… I was told when I started writing that your first book, no matter what genre it is—poetry, nonfiction, or fiction—is going to become autobiographical. I just accepted that and decided to embrace it—I really saw a lot of the first major poetry projects that I wrote as a study on lineage and heritage. My entire first book really feels like it orbits the themes of inheritance and becoming. And what does that mean? For me, of course, it’s really personally tied with family. But then, also coming from East Asian culture, your identity is extremely intertwined with the concept of your lineage and your ancestors. So it became a long song about my family going back many generations on both sides. And what does that mean for identity now, of being able to write through them and for them and because of them and their continued survival? “Magpie 까치” is one of the epilogue poems of that sequence in my writing life, where I spent a whole book and ten years of my life writing about heritage, and the things that my family has done positively or negatively to survive throughout the generations, and how beautiful and painful it can be to press on the bruise of it through poetry.

“Magpie 까치” is the end culmination of that; I’m starting to look towards other themes in my life, since I’ve gotten this really big one mostly covered. I’m starting to look towards animals, ecocriticism, to touch on colonialism a little bit more, and all of those are intertwined with my grandmother’s story in particular in “Magpie 까치.”

She was born into a brutal annexation of Japan to Korea during the early to mid 1900s. It was a colonization that tried to erase her name, and her national identity and her culture in a lot of ways. I often will try to talk to my grandparents, but, as anyone with immigrant grandparents might know, it can be difficult to get direct answers about their own personal experience. I have to collect little nuggets of gold whenever I can.

About two years ago, when I was visiting halmeoni (할머니) in Korea, she said there was a magpie every time we were walking around outside. “There’s a bird there.” Oriental magpies are a lot like a crow or raven in the US—the large kind of sleek black bird. I was so intrigued, because every time she saw one she was like, that one is lucky. I kept feeling haunted by that, because she’s had such a challenging life. She was born under Japanese annexation; she almost starved to death multiple times; she’s one of eight siblings from two mothers; she was a refugee at eight years old. She walked the length of Korea on foot multiple times during the Korean War. She grew up largely in a refugee camp in Busan. But she considers herself very lucky—to be haunted by these lucky images such as the magpie. I thought that was both so beautiful and so hauntingly tragic, and that ends up culminating in the end of this poem: “Lucky she called the magpies, although I always wondered—for who?”

CLAIRE

First of all, your grandmother’s life sounds absolutely like something out of a story. That is so crazy to think about.

ARAH

She gives main character energy all the way.

CLAIRE

She does give main character energy—that’s actually crazy!

That surprises me about a lot of our grandparents, too—how they’ve all gone through the most insane events that would be in a newspaper article nowadays, but they never talk about it. I only hear about it from a whispered sentence. It’s so crazy to think about. Also, I love the phrase you used—to press upon a bruise. I noticed that’s also the imagery you use in “Fiddleback,” which I thought was really interesting.

You talked about how your culture feeds into your poetry, and how a lot of it touches your lineage. So I was wondering, how can you reconcile creative intent with keeping to the truth of something, or not negatively impacting the people you know in any way? I know that that’s a concern for a lot of people who engage in poetry, who write about their family.

ARAH

I’m looking up a quote really quickly—don’t want to misspeak it. Alright, yes, I think that’s such an important question. I think it dominates nonfiction, memoir, and creative non-fiction. How does your language and writing affect the living? How can that damage or repair your real life relationships? I think that is a constant and devastating question that writers have to return to again and again.

For me, a lot of my writing touches on the nonfiction. The speaker of the poem, who may or may not be myself, often engages with my real life content. I think the thing about poetry that helps me is the way that it’s shrouded in layers of image; it does distance it a little bit from the bare bones of the truth. You can take the emotional core, and then use that to write, and it’s often more forgiving than the kind of brutal inventory that memoir can produce. In that way, poetry allows a little bit more of a veil that can be protective of the real life characters. What I mean by that is there’s some plausible deniability. Am I talking in this poem? Is it the speaker? Is this a character? A lot of the time, I will use a strong image or a persona voice in order to speak indirectly about something that’s especially difficult to name in my real life. That allows enough distance it often can shield the real life impact. So, I think, in a lot of ways I’m protected by the genre of poetry.

On the other hand, a lot of my poems do push the envelope and call a lot of people out, especially men, and name my grandparents for the very complicated people they were. They are full of contradictions. They are very religious, but have had brushes with addiction. They are impatient, but willing to suffer for many decades. They are picky, but uncomplaining. They live almost solely in the present as a way to survive the past. Being able to name them for how complicated they are is also a way to honor them; I think if it’s only glossed over, it’s a disingenuous portrait.

And then, beyond that, I think it’s been helpful because my own mother is an artist and has done writing in the past. She grew up with that strong understanding of, you know, you’re going to write from your own experience, and the people in your life are going to be part of that. She always quoted Anne Lamott to me; she said tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. I think there’s a multi-layer here, right? It’s not my grandmother’s behavior that’s getting pulled up in this poem of “Magpie 까치,” but more of her trauma. I want to respect that as well. It’s not about behaving one way or another, so I do feel like I don’t want to hide that from her. I read a lot of my poems to her—there’s another veil there of language, because she speaks four languages, but just doesn’t understand English quite well enough to get the poem.

She understands that I’m writing about her and her experience as a child with her brothers, and quoting her very directly in this particular poem. She’s really tickled by that. She keeps recommending me different books and telling me to visit certain historical sites in Korea. She said to me this summer: a lot of Korean immigrants don’t care to know that much about their home culture, but you do. A lot of that was because I felt very divorced from my home culture. My dad refused to teach me Korean, so I went looking for it. And that ended up being a special bonding moment between us. So, while it can be a separating factor to tell the truth of your own life, in my experience, it’s often been healing.

CLAIRE

That’s really incredible to hear. The way you described your grandparents—how they’re full of contradictions—is so warm. I can really tell how it’s fed into your poetry and life; it sounds like a healing process instead of being a damaging process, which I think is what poetry is in the end.

I know “Magpie 까치” and “Fiddleback”don’t specifically play into form as much as some of your other poems do—one of them being “Sorry I Didn’t Call You Back.” I love that poem, by the way—one of my favorite poems from Split Lip Magazine ever. I feel there was a lot of experimentation with form there. So, I was wondering, how do you deal with form in your poetry? What do you let it dictate, and what do you not let it dictate?

ARAH

I am so glad you searched that up. I think I started poetry very safe. I had very particular ideas about what form should be, what form was like—eloquent or elegant. I became very comfortable with more conventional forms like couplets and tercets; ones that relied on enjambment and a delicate breaking of the sentences. I still love that. But I had become too attached to it, and I needed to expand a little bit.

Once I’d finished most of my first book project, I started looking at prose poetry more, which I always considered myself to be bad at. I wanted to expand and focus on that kind of poetry, because I couldn’t rely on the line breaks and enjambment that I so relied on in the past. So that was what “Magpie 까치” and “Fiddleback” were both part of—this effort to hand-write these prose poems that were not able to use the conventions of poetry that I banked on. I instead had to rely on fast-paced images, voices in the poem, strong character, music of the line, lists.

And I became so obsessed with lists. I adore listing poems. I just had one in Apogee Journal called “Afterlife Inventory,” and it’s just a long list. I think it’s fun to see how much—as a poet—you can get away with building a story by only placing images back-to-back-to-back, and having the images have relationships with each other.

There’s this ongoing Twitter meme that gets pulled up every couple of months, which says ‘we get it, poets, things are like other things.’ I love that and hate it at the same time, because it’s so brutally accurate. That is what poetry is doing—it’s comparing an emotion to another thing, an image to another. By doing that, you’re creating meaning. I think that is one of the most beautiful things that you can do with our language. That was really the treasure that I was hunting for in these poems.

Once I’d written a lot of prose poems, I started to push the form even further, and go, what if this happened? And this happened? “Sorry I Didn’t Call You Back” is one of my most risky poems, and I really had fun with it. I’m honored that Split Lip took a chance on me. I had written up one of those prose poems by hand, but I couldn’t remember a word that I needed to write, and I was on an airplane. I had no Wi-Fi. I couldn’t look it up. I was distraught. So, I just put a blank space, like an underlined space where the word was supposed to go. And then I kept writing, and I realized there’s another word I didn’t know, so I underlined that as well. When I went back and read the poem draft that I’d scribbled out by hand, I realized that I liked the blank spaces better than actually filling them in, because it forced you to imagine what could go there. And that’s where the prose poem really exploded into this fill in the blanks genre that I’m continuing to write. I have a new one that I’m working on right now which follows in that lineage.

CLAIRE

I really love your fill-in-the-blanks poems! I think there is a chance taken, and it’s a chance that works. When I first read it, I was like, wow, this is incredible because it’s such a break from the usual prose poetry, even though it’s written in prose format. And I feel what you’re saying with struggling with prose poetry; it’s so hard to know if what you’re writing is actually interesting or not—it can be very boring to read. I think there’s a fine line between prosaicness, clarity and imagery, which I feel like you pull off really well. I couldn’t tell that it’s what you struggle with at all!

Actually, I heard you mention that you write by hand. Is that something you commonly do throughout your creative writing process? Or is this a plane thing specifically?

ARAH

Both! I think I find it very helpful to write by hand, partly because it slows me down. When I’m typing, I can erase quickly. I’m a perfectionist, so I love to edit, Google the right word, fill in the blanks. Being able to separate myself from all those resources, and instead have to rely on whatever I’m thinking in the moment, slow down to the pace of my handwriting—which is a crawl—and really take the time to fill out the sentences, changes the quality of the cadence. I think that can help me, especially when I’m a little frozen by writer’s block, or I’m trying to find a more authentic voice to speak from. Almost my entire ANIMAL LOGIC chapbook, I think, except one or two poems, was written by hand originally, in the same notebook on my friend’s couch in Seattle.

I’d just finished my MFA, and I wrote the whole thing in almost a month. It was a wild experience, because I was feeling so much existential dread. I’d finished my Master’s degree. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life exactly, but I had just been to Korea and heard all these stories from my grandparents. I was going back to Hawaii, where I grew up, and there were a lot of environmental problems there. They overflowed into my writing life—I just ended up writing prose poem after prose poem about animals, and they all ended up being way more complicated than the initial animal image that I had started with, as poetry is want to do. It blossoms from there. Image is never just one thing; I saw them superimposing onto other aspects of my life. Sexism, racism, lineage, heritage, colonialism, environment—the poem became what it wanted to be over time. That was a fun and strange experience!

I really recommend the handwriting process—it’s a way to shake up your normal rhythm. I think that it was very valuable for me in the sense that it was more tactile, and it made me think about the line break differently; you’re constrained to a physical page, and that was very appropriate for the prose poetry form. It allowed me to not have the lines and spaces that are imposed by a Word document.

CLAIRE

Definitely. First of all, one month finishing an entire book is insane.

ARAH

I didn’t have any other work to do, so it was my full time job, and I was like, oh, I can do this! I was just eating burritos and writing a chapbook. Then, I was lucky enough to get it placed with Bull City Press, which has been amazing. I highly recommend them. They’re very cool.

CLAIRE

That’s still incredible. Not getting hit by writer’s block in a month is actually unheard of, at least for me. And congrats on the chapbook! What you said about handwriting is something I’ve noticed, too—I believe Ocean Vuong actually spoke about this before. If I remember correctly, he said that he wrote his entire novel by hand because it gave him time to think before the line actually appeared on page. That’s definitely something I’ve experienced this summer; at Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, they don’t let you use electronics at all unless there are special circumstances, so every workshop and seminar you’re forced to write by hand. It’s mandatory. There’s fourteen people in a class, and everyone’s writing by hand! It was definitely a very unique experience—I would maybe not do it again. But it was very interesting, for sure, and I feel like the layout of your poem really changes when you put it on a page. You don’t have the option of easily deleting everything. It’s there, and you have to deal with it.

ARAH

Absolutely. I find myself skipping to the core of what I want to say more when I’m writing by hand, because it’s so costly. Every word costs me. It hurts my hand, my thumb is cramping, the page is running out of space—there’s an urgency to it, and also a slowness to it, that I find hard to achieve under regular circumstances in my digital life.

CLAIRE

Yeah, definitely, especially what you said about a page. Turning a page and writing on the next page is so much more difficult by hand—it feels like a barrier you don’t really want to cross. So you’re limited to that specific page and your poem creates itself from there. Handwriting—well, it does cramp my hands, so not sure if it’s long-lasting. But it’s definitely an experiment!

About conserving words and being specific with your images, do you have a specific policy on imagery? I know that concession and brevity is a big consideration these days.

ARAH

For me, the big space-saving move that brings my own poetry to the next level is not the image itself, but the verbiage used around it. If you look at “Magpie 까치,” you can hear it in “when her youngest brothers wept and rustled in the nest, she played the game.” They become the magpies in that moment, because of just the two words “rustled” and “nest.” By using these slight surprises of words, you’re able to transform characters and actions and moments simply through the verbiage. Strange verb language can really re-enliven your poem and give it an energy that is hard to get any other way.

So my suggestion is: keep your images, however you want them. But really focus on experimenting with strange diction when it comes to verbs and condensing them. Instead of using four words to get where you need to go, can you find one verb that will bridge the gap? And I find that bolds your poem into something really compact and meteoric. So that’s an exciting experiment to try! I really like to push my creative writing students to do that and use more and more inventive verbs.

A lot of what contemporary poetry is taking on as a project is the re-stranging of language—because we read so much, and there’s so much content that we have access to. There’s a long and exhaustive and often boring canon and a lot of the exciting efforts of contemporary poets I see are making you see old things new again, or bringing their own personal and fresh experience into something that you thought was familiar. There’s less of an attachment to the concept that we have to be wholly original all the time—more, how can we refresh this for this generation? How can you make this language so new it’s like we’re hearing it for the first time?

CLAIRE

Yeah, that’s a really interesting point to bring up. I think what you said about reimagining verbs is really distinct in modern poetry, because there’s such a repetition of word usage that you’re forced to be inventive. I noticed in “Magpie 까치,” there’s a line that says “they’re very cruel to us, the Japanese soldiers, my grandmother shudders.” Here, we have a verb instead of a dialogue tag, and that’s so visceral in how it depicts both dialogue and action. There’s something to be said for using language in a way that’s not expected. I think contemporary poetry is gradually evolving into that.

Breaking off onto what you said about originality, how do you think we can approach subject matters in a way that’s more distinct if we’re all essentially writing about the same things? Have you ever struggled with thinking about if your writing has any substance to it, or if it really adds anything new to literary canon?

ARAH

I never really bought into the nihilism of ‘I have to be original and perfect all the time,’ because I knew that was impossible. I wasn’t trying to be perfect or original. I was just telling the story that I felt I needed to. I’m one of those people who is going to write no matter what occupation I have, and I just ended up being really lucky, and also supported, in having a career where I can do that full time. But I think everyone has a worthy story to tell, and nobody can tell it the way you’re telling it at this exact moment. Even if it’s a worn or tried-and-true narrative—like my grandparents’ immigration story is not new, it’s maybe one of the oldest stories you could have in certain ways—I still think it’s very particular and unique to them. It’s made anew by my own life and experiences.

I also feel less self conscious about it because in many ways, I’m writing on behalf of a lot of other people in my life who haven’t had the opportunity to share their voice. When you’re working to make a lesser-known voice, there’s an urgency and triumph that takes precedence over your own self-consciousness. My mother’s grandmother got married at fourteen, and never got past a seventh grade education—in many ways, I’m writing for her. My Korean halmeoni (할머니) who had to leave her language behind and find a new life—I’m writing for her. When you take on this chorus of voices from your life that you’re able to write for and to and through, I think I’m way less self-conscious about ‘oh, I need to be this good,’ or ‘I need to be this original.’ I think that’s the wrong question. Even if you have a time-worn story, it’s going to be specific to your own experience. A lot of it has to do with the timeliness; a lot of it has to do with your individual experience, and how that juxtaposes with the old.

I don’t believe in divorcing fully from the sonnet and the conventionally worn path, but I think there’s a way to refresh it by bringing in new and unexpected things. That contrast creates something miraculous in a poem.

CLAIRE

That’s really beautiful. We’re always writing for other people, and everybody is different, so there is inherently originality in everything we write.

ARAH

Yeah. I had a classmate in undergrad, who was a philosophy major. We were reading Raymond Carver, and he was like, why do you even write? You can never be Raymond Carver. I was so mad at him for a lot of reasons, because this was an affluent white student, and he was saying I couldn’t be Raymond Carver, who was very famous.

CLAIRE

Yeah, I love Raymond Carver.

ARAH

Yes—and from another generation! And I was like, obviously, my story is going to be different from his. I would never try to be Raymond Carver. I can see how you would be discouraged in trying to be Raymond Carver, but there’s no point in that, because we don’t need Raymond Carver. We need Ocean Vuong. We need our own generation’s voices, and I think that is something that’s never going to go out of necessity.

CLAIRE

Yeah, I think the needs of expression for every generation have changed a lot, and especially who’s representing those needs. So, that classmate—well, philosophy majors, you know. It’s a hit or miss with them.

Could you briefly introduce your forthcoming full-length collection and chapbook?

ARAH

Absolutely! BRINE ORCHID (YesYes Books 2025) is my debut full-length collection. It’s coming out in April. I’ll be at AWP with copies! It’s about contradictions—you know, a brine orchid is an impossible thing. It’s all about inheritance and the stories that we tell; a lot of it relies on very old stories, religious narratives, folklore, and intertwining that with my family narrative. It does a lot of what “Magpie 까치” is doing, but in different and explosive forms, and tracing that across the stories of history. It draws on the lineage of my own family while also acknowledging that we’re all part of the family of humanity, and the stories that that imposes upon us. I really like the freedom that it offers while also having an echoing sense that I’m not the first person to be writing about that—but I’m the first person to be writing about my own story. So it’s all about heritage. That first book, as I said, embraced the autobiographical quality of the ‘first book.’

ANIMAL LOGIC (Bull City Press 2026) is coming out from Bull City Press in early 2026. We already have a cover. I’m really excited. It has “Sorry I Didn’t Call You Back,” “Fiddleback,” and “Magpie 까치” in it—I feel like it might be up your alley. I’m in the process of getting blurbs for it right now, which has been a new and scary and fun experience. I think a lot of that collection emerged from just realizing that not everyone had this more harsh, rural experience of animals, and what that looks like. Maybe a little bit of it comes from a rural immigrant experience, where my very main character energy grandmother would not hesitate to take ducks from the park and eat them if she had to. It’s so different from the clinical Midwestern suburban culture that I went to school in! It’s able to acknowledge the rawness and animalistic nature of life.

Also, it was almost all written by hand! It was a really fun little project book. I had originally called it PAST AND FUTURE BESTIARY, because I wanted to draw on that mythical quality. But there’s already so many amazing authors who have ‘bestiary’ in their titles, like K-Ming Chang—who has this wonderful magical realist style—and I ended up changing it to ANIMAL LOGIC. I liked how it was inviting the reader to think about the rules that we exist in as humans, and how contradictory they are sometimes. How, in many ways, they don’t make sense in the face of ecological and sociopolitical disaster. Maybe that was a little too long. You can cut that one short.

CLAIRE

No, I love that answer. It’s really amazing to hear the thought process behind your two collections. I will absolutely be purchasing both of them when they’re out.

Thank you so much, Arah. It’s been a pleasure. I would have loved to learn more about Hawaii, and how living there impacted your poetry and your life!

ARAH

Hit me up anytime! It was a pleasure to talk to you, Claire. Thank you for having me.

Watch this space for preorder links for BRINE ORCHID and ANIMAL LOGIC

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 is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the Ohio State University and is a Ph.D. student in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Catch her at arahko.com.

Claire Zhou is a student currently residing in Suzhou, China. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Chestnut Review, DIALOGIST, Notre Dame Review, Moon City Review, Gulf Coast, and Shō Poetry Journal. She loves baking.