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.

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 the chapbook Postcards (Bull City Press, 2022) and a student at Harvard College.

"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

"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. This book is an act of devotion, an offering of light." — KIMBERLY GREY, author of Systems for the Future of Feeling

"'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