"Arah Ko’s restless forms dazzle with inventiveness and unrelenting ferocity. ‘There is an animal inside each / of us, or there should be,’ she writes, redefining the distinctions between human and animal life forms, as well as the language by which we understand our own embodiment—the body’s flesh and stink; its animal hungers, rot and remains. Probing the wilds of human cruelty and family history, Ko confronts the leavings of her own past, saying, ‘it will take time to chew // through what’s left of me.’ An exaltation, a shiver, a murder, a bloom—this collection of poems enacts every one of these terms, and so much more.”
—Mia Ayumi Malhotra, author of Mothersalt

“Imagine a littoral zone made up entirely of language—a place where words slip, and echo, and morph. That is the habitat for the poems in Animal Logic. Form-mimicking, shell-shucking, and scream-weaving, Ko’s pieces invite us to witness evolutions. Here, survival is born from the twist of a tongue, from the shift of a line, from a choice between fins, or fangs, or wings. Like the smiling axolotl, regenerating, each poem sings with the voices of lives lived in between.”
—Mag Gabbert, author of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS