Toxic Flora (2010) marks a significant departure from Asian American poet Kimiko Hahn’s previous poetry collections in terms of subject matter and form. These poems have their origins in various science articles from the New York Times and serve as meditations on nature and human nature, punctuated with musings by an “I” whose voice seems more mature and quietly confident compared to Hahn’s previous collections. However, when read in the context of her other work, we see that the issues she is most passionate about subjectivity, language, home- continue to weave themselves into the fabric of Toxic Flora. In Toxic Flora, in addition to the usual themes, there is a new intellectual curiosity for things scientific and a strong sense of discovering “In things the most unlike some qualities / Having relationship and family ties” (from Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphrey Davy) as she notes in the epigraph of her book. The poems are grouped into sections with topics running the gamut from insects to birds to planets to extinct species to sea creatures to dinosaurs to the brain, divided by short paragraphs that provide a running commentary on sexual cannibalism. The science articles, which serve as an archive of public memory, are tied to personal memories about family and friends of the poems’ speaker as she “traces analogies” and “fervent geography.” Through these, she gains new ways to organize her life by acknowledging the passage of time: for instance, a past marriage is like an extinct animal; Maui, her mother’s childhood home, becomes a Darwinian locale; her late mother is memorialized in the heavens; and her concerns about her grown daughters alter. Thus, the act of remembering and sorting via science reconfigures family and home for Hahn’s poetic alter ego to redefine herself in the twenty-first century.