Swimming Between Islands
The island you were born on
is crammed with cabinets
and grandfather clocks.

Nearby, the island of children
with its shrieks and red tapestries
and the island of one day, when.

You have the sea and its bed,
a silvery current of hair
and a necklace of eggs

where a hundred new things grow.
The horizon looks toothed
but those are more islands:

the island of slow translation,
the island of choirs. An island of frogs
who spend their lives inside flowers.

On some you'll find you breathe better
underwater than in their thundery air.
Soon you'll have an island forest,

ribcage ferns exhaling green.
Swimmers will come to your house
to borrow your eyes.
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"Swimming Between Islands" appears in my collection of the same name, which was published by Carcanet in 2023 and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. I wrote the poem after reading a tweet by a man asking what women will do with their lives between the ages of 40 and 80 if they don't become mothers. The tweet led to a surprisingly calm, beautiful thread full of people without children listing things they plan to do.

Charlotte Eichler on "Swimming Between Islands"
Review of Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon

"These poems peek into kitchens, tumble over hills, mountains and the moon, step across straits and oceans, into kitchens, and even the consciousness of dolls. They mourn alongside a community of mothers, stomaching the chewed meat of loss. Kim’s poetic gaze roves endlessly over this broad world, defying borders and military suppression."

via BIG ISSUE
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Color cover image of Kai Ihns' book, Of
What Sparks Poetry:
Kai Ihns on Building Community


"I think this dispersed but somehow coherent ‘I’ that exists in relation and as a problem of negotiating how one is oriented… I’m interested in this because I do feel like it’s a way poetry can process its world, in this case a world that requires complex negotiations of… realities, and the selves that can exist in them. You have to actively negotiate what you think the ground is, all the time… and that partially determines how you can be in relation."
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