Cover Reveal! Antibody by Elane Kim

January 02, 2026

Antibody (February, 2026) Design by Alban Fischer

It’s a new year, and we are so happy to celebrate Elane Kim’s new cover for ANTIBODY, forthcoming in February 2026 (and which you can preorder today)! A senior at Harvard, Antibody is Kim’s debut collection.

More about Antibody: Antibody, Elane Kim’s debut collection, pays vivid, clarifying attention to the sensory world and family histories. Meditating on acts of care, science, light, translation, girlhood, and Korean-American identity, Kim offers poetry as a safeguard against forgetting, a hedge against devastation. Reaching for and through the vocabulary of grief, these elegiac poems hold fiercely to memories of a departed mother. For the speakers in this book, language and the sharing of language offer connection to a time before the body knew loss.

❝

“What is remedy? / A way to cling to the ruin. To make it last.”

Elane Kim

SONNET AS FIRST WORDS

Say ah. Say eomma. Say appa. Say, aren’t you too old

to be learning English? Say apple. Say appel. Say

there is more to the world than where your knees

have kissed the pavement. Say spit. Say sorry. Repeat after me:

native speaker. Say grace. Say, This is my home. Let’s say

you love her, and she doesn’t love you back. Call it language.

Don’t you know the present tense of wound is still wound?

Say mother. Say father. Say it over again. Let your tongue

become a washboard, your body past tense, your body minor

chord. Say amendment, contraction, the declaration

like a prayer. Say warzone. Say warzone. Say,

I am waiting for this country to love me back. Future

tense. Repeat after me. Stay quiet. Stay quiet. Stay

a little longer. Say eomma, appa.

Elane Kim

Elane Kim is a Korean American writer from California. The editor-in-chief of Gaia Lit, she is the recipient of the 2024 Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, the winner of the 2021 Columbia Journal Winter Poetry Contest, and a Davidson Fellow in Literature. Her writing can be found in Poetry, Narrative Magazine, One Teen Story, and more. She is the author of Postcards (Bull City Press, 2022) and a student at Harvard College.

“Everything we love does not belong to us.” Elane Kim’s Antibody is a sweeping and elegiac book about grief and language and vision. It’s about what can be seen through, and in, the dying light. It’s a book written by a formally restless and inventive poet torn between two languages and two traditions, trying to find a home. What do you do when you can’t find a home? You have to create one for yourself. Antibody is that creation. JOSH BELL, author of The Gods in Small Doses

In Antibody, Elane Kim transforms the body into archive, altar, and experiment, writing as both witness and scientist, daughter and maker. These poems are ablaze with hunger, precision, and tenderness, carrying us from kitchen smoke to hospital rooms, from Gyeongju’s dust to California drought, from the dream of a homeland to the ache of its distance. Kim’s gift is her ability to hold contradiction without collapsing it: the poems live in both wound and wonder, grief and astonishment. “Sometimes, the only thing separating a body from grief is more grief,” she writes, and the book follows that logic, turning loss into a language that sings. The lyric is deeply sensorial—full of cicadas, moon jars, soft pears, ginseng, soot—but also electric with scientific clarity: “I paint / entire lineages radioactive green, / stained fluorescent with protein.” This is a collection preoccupied with survival—but survival, here, is not flat endurance but radiant invention. Kim interrogates what it means to be daughter, immigrant, citizen, poet, to inherit not just language but silence, hunger, and the histories of others. She makes of those inheritances something startling and new—sonnets that teach the body to speak, diptychs that reimagine myth, manifestos that reassemble language syllable by syllable. At its heart is the insistence that nothing—not grief, not estrangement, not exile—is beyond re-making. This book is an act of devotion, an offering of light. KIMBERLY GREY, author of Systems for the Future of Feeling

Elane Kim’s exquisite debut makes me think of Gaston Bachelard’s thought that “one must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.” Kim’s poems are intricate architectures that refuse to flinch in the face of grief, trauma, and loss with each poem “searching for sweetness / where there is only dust.” Using a fierce and measured voice, Kim builds a timeless structure that stands firmly against the chaotic forces of the outside world. ADAM CLAY, author of Circle Back

Preorder Antibody by Elane Kim today! Note that you can use the code 2025GIFT as a coupon code at checkout to receive 10% discount and free shipping. And thank you, as always, for supporting small press poetry. When we say it means the world, we mean it.

Han & Amorak