In her debut poetry collection, “Antibody,” Elane Kim ’27 — a Korean-American student at Harvard College, originally from California — presents the body not as something inherited, but as a site of tension: an immigrant archive, daughter’s burden, and source of poetry. The collection asks what remains after translation as it moves across languages and countries, between mother and daughter, and through illness and its aftermath. Kim’s poems are saturated with light, suggesting that survival is not passive endurance but something built carefully through language.

Divided into three sections — “Bright-Field,” “Stray Light,” and “Afterimage” — “Antibody” takes its language from science and photography. These titles suggest that vision itself is full of subjective depth and focus. The opening section situates the reader in a domestic and diasporic space, where kitchens, hospital rooms, and grocery stores become sites of inquiry. In “Suite D,” Kim insists, “I want to be honest. I swear / I can only say what I mean,” yet that certainty does not endure. Honesty becomes “hydrogen peroxide: / the hiss, the foam at your mouth,” turning truth into something that stings even as it cleans. In Kim’s work, clarity often carries pain.

Inheritance is one of the collection’s central concerns: inheritance of language, grief, and appetite. In “Axiom,” Kim writes, “Translation is an act / of replacement. Eomma’s words becoming my / apologies,” crystallizing a core tension in the book. Korean and English coexist throughout the poems, not for a decorative purpose, but rather functioning as markers of distance and closeness. Words such as “eomma,” “appa,” and "halmeoni” remain untranslated, keeping the poems grounded in family, even as the surrounding English grows more abstract. In “Sonnet as First Words,” the repeated command “Say eomma. Say appa.” connects early childhood speech with questions of belonging.

While hunger shapes much of the book, so does sight. Not only are eyes a major component of the book cover, but they also appear throughout the book — washed with chemicals in “Sonnet at the Supermarket,” reddened after surgery in “Sightlines,” and preserved in memory in the title poem. In the titular poem “Antibody,” Kim works in a laboratory, painting “entire lineages radioactive green, / stained fluorescent with protein.” The scientific language does not distance emotion but rather sharpens it. Fluorescence becomes a metaphor for exposure, for the way grief glows under examination.

The emotional center of the collection is its portrayal of family, especially Appa. In the prose poem “Murder Hornets,” financial strain and quiet love exist side by side. The father’s small house and modern routines are described plainly, which makes his final words more painful: “You can stay longer, you know. You can stay / as long as you like.” This line lingers. Variations of this waiting — for a phone call, a visit, and a poem to finish — appear throughout the book. In “Appa Has This Recurring Dream,” the father sits in an auditorium, unable to move on because he is waiting for his daughter to finish reading. The image is simple but powerful: The poem becomes the thing that holds him there, and writing is both a way of keeping him close and a way of letting him go.

Still, “Antibody” does not remain only in grief. The final section, “Afterimage,” turns toward what remains after loss. In “Eating Kimchi Alone,” Kim describes the sharp, burning taste of kimchi as “like formaldehyde or a hometown”, tying memory to the body in a way that is both comfortable and intimate. The poem suggests that being alone is not always the same as being abandoned. Bitterness, too, can be sustaining. At the end of the title poem, when deer track mud into the house, the author says, “Come as you are. Stay / a while.” The invitation feels generous; instead of shutting grief out, the poem consistently makes room for it.

Kim does return often to certain images, and at times,the repetition risks feeling heavy. More often, however, the repetition works steadily, allowing the poem to circle the same questions that have not been resolved. With “Antibody,” Kim shows range — she writes about being a daughter, an immigrant, a student of science, and a poet without reducing any of those roles to a simple label. The collection is thoughtful and carefully made. As its title suggests, the book responds to pain not by shutting down, but by shaping it into something that can endure.

—Staff writer Leah Choi can be reached at [email protected].