Inherit

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Ginger Ko's INHERIT is a multi-generational testament of the trauma of immigration, domesticity, flight, and intergenerational wounds. Writing as a woman first, Ko lays bare a collective "I" in this raw, measured record of inheritance that writes into the gap between generations of women rendered alien by their experience. In the book's two sequences, Ko takes great care to disclose how past personal afflictions can act as a catalyst for finding future lines of escape. INHERIT is not a push for resolution. Instead, impelled by "a constant fear of furthering the sequence," Ko pushes to be heard as something more than a "woman and not white." The result is a powerful collection of poems relentlessly questing for an answer: how do you come to accept and own your whole self?