E. J. Koh

E. J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, winner of the 2016 Pleiades Editors Prize, called “first-rate, intelligent, pure-gold – a triumph.” Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, Southeast Review, World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, Narrative, The Margins, PEN America, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean Press, 2014), and elsewhere. She accepted fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, Kundiman, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing Poetry & Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. She is completing her PhD at the University of Washington for English Language and Literature in Seattle.

August Poetry: Two Poems by E. J. Koh

"Ghosts" and "1807 Oleander"

This August, we present E. J. Koh’s poems, “Ghosts” and “1807 Oleander,” which blend lyric with narrative to offer meditations on longing—longing for companionship, for family, for home. In “Ghosts,” the speaker divulges more about the ghosts of her home than about its residents, then concludes with a startling yet fleeting moment of self-reflection.