Ko, Arah: Animal Logic

Bull City Press, chapbook

Publication Date: May 5, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

Both hymn and howl, Animal Logic speaks in the language of survival. Arah Ko concerns herself with how our world’s glorious flora and fauna are watched, hunted, cared for, named, ready “to add them to the past and future bestiary, that record we living keep for the dead.” These poems—which consider the drift of jellyfish and the soar of blackbirds—are “built for threat, recoiling from bear caves, cleaned bones, venomous tongues.” In equal measures a work of eco-criticism and a study of human behavior, Animal Logic witnesses. It remembers. It resists.

“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

“‘All she wanted was to unfurl.’ Whether speaking literally of the Corpse Flower, or metaphorically of the body being perverted into shame, or memory-ing a childhood ‘feeding by the sea,’ the more-than-human world is pulsating, endangered, lusty, and teaching us in Arah Ko’s Animal Logic. Ko’s poems crack open humanity’s estrangement to our animality. Ko’s voices understand how ‘aposematism is nature’s mercy,’ in both the evolution of self and in healing from trauma. She invokes Korean definitions to unsettle the violences of English, to demonstrate how the objectification and degradation of language, women of color, and the more-than-human world correlate in Empire’s toxic masculine history. Evocative in thinking, daring in ecojustice, Ko’s worlds look our deeds square in the eyes, ‘Axolotl, I too have lived between worlds, been scattered from my habitat, enclosed in an Illinois suburb…You, nearing extinction. We call it *pollution, invasion, urbanization*, but you can say it: It’s our fault.’ A hunger exists in Animal Logic—to honor our animalness is to find our wildness, our instinctual connectivity to the world— an urge to fight for the various layers of the sacred.” —Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones

“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

“Animal Logic moves through its sharp conceits—conjuring ‘avian memory’ and ‘vampiric humming’—without ever tiring of insight and delight. From the endangered palila to the ordinary pullet, Ko roots a careful I in the natural world and invites us in: ‘You are taking this creature home. / You are home.’ Embodied and expansive, each poem in this collection is its own crafted habitat—at once tender cradle and carnivore bite.” —Stephanie Choi, author of The Lengest Neoi