Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Artist's Daughter (2002), The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006), Toxic Flora (2010), and Brain Fever (2014). Reviewing Brain Fever in the Boston Review, Benjamin Landry wrote that Hahn’s “earlier work—wide-ranging in mode and theme—often aspired to the long-form zuihitsu, a diary-like monologue incorporating textbook definitions, email responses, exclamations, recalled speech, loose associations, declarations and reversals.

These contemporary zuihitsu evinced an appealing honesty, replicating as they did the mind’s clutter.” Her later work, like that found in "Toxic Flora" and "Brain Fever"—both engagements with science articles found in the New York Times—“does away with much of the clutter." Its anchoring form is the short poem in couplets, with the occasional single-line stanza.

These poems glow with concentrated energy, and their dense arrangements usefully contain Hahn’s previous meandering tendencies. Consequently, these new poems exhibit the ‘gemlike’ quality Hahn avowedly admires. Her new collection Foreign Bodies is forthcoming in 2020. She teaches in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York. Presented with O, Miami Poetry Festival.