Thursday evening, the Pearlman Lounge held an intimate gathering of poetry lovers, both young and old, waiting to hear Kimiko Hahn. Hahn is a lauded poet who is a winner of, among many other awards, the American Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Throughout the evening, she alternated between reading from her latest poetry volume, Toxic Flora, and digressing on her inspirations, experiences and love for words.

Most of the poems in Toxic Flora were inspired by the science section of The New York Times. Hahn told the audience, "I have always loved research material, or what I like to call ‘outside material.' … I love feeling inspired by things outside my immediate surroundings. I love how language can trigger personal stuff and also light up the imagination."

Taking her over 10 years to complete, the collection contained a mix of lyric poems and her version of a Japanese form called the zuihitsu. "I like to compare [the zuihitsu] to a fungus," Hahn explained, "because a fungus is not plant or animal, it's a species unto itself, and the zuihitsu is not poetry or prose. It's zuihitsu." She went on to describe that it sometimes takes the form of a list or a diary, but always has "a very strong subjective voice and a feeling of spontaneity."

Throughout her poems, Hahn shows a keen yet observational distance in an attempt to see the whole picture. She does not use flowery language or romanticize a scene to create an effect; her concision speaks louder than any effect could. The free verse poems often explain a scientific phenomenon and proceed to reveal a human depth by insightfully connecting science to growing up, family or life in general.

Toxic Flora is divided into several themes: plants, insects, birds, astronomy, marine, sexual cannibalism and dreams. Whether the subject is about the division of species due to plate tectonics, the deception of living things in order to survive or even sexual cannibalism, she brings a fresh perspective.

The ends of each poem during the reading inspired a diverse array of audience reactions. Sometimes the audience was silent, just digesting a thought or an insight into something. Other times they laughed in delight at Hahn's wit, which was the case with "The dream of knife, fork and spoon," in which a humiliating nightmare causes the speaker to forget how to properly arrange a table for a party. Sometimes her poems exhibited a more sinister humor. In "On Butterflies," an entomologist on Maui studies a rare butterfly that eats other animals, such as snails. Hahn compares the rare behavior to an escalating series of belligerent acts, such as "a mother who rips open her own infant/to release the demon inside./This hunger is less rare/than a butterfly with sharp teeth./My mother is from Maui."

Regardless of her approach, Hahn's reading clearly displayed her love for words, which drives her curiosity. "So this is what happens, I'll be reading an article, and I think, ‘That's my way in,'" Hahn said. "I look for words that kind of are a portal … into the material personally. … That's where I try and enter in."

For example, "frequency" to Hahn is a word portal. In "Ode to 52 Hz," she describes a lonely whale, of an unknown species, that moans at a deep 52 hertz frequency. Its only listener, a scientist named Mary Ann Daher, has died. "So who will listen to 52 hertz?" Hahn asks in her poem.

She depicts the whale as having our own desires and longings, and ties together the scientific "frequency" of a pitch and our own projections that we "frequently" long for.

Such mastery with words requires a standard that Hahn upholds for herself. She said, "For me, whatever the person is writing about, if they don't hit a nerve, then I'm not interested, no matter how wonderful the idea is, … because at the end of the day, if it doesn't hit a nerve for me, then why should I expect you to be interested either?"