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An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea
and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic
envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her
new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the
collective grief of parting through what she calls an
“I-do-bird-sequence,” where “Bird-human is the ‘I.’”
Her remarkable essay “Bird Rider” explains: “I came to write
Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds
endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird
language that flies to places I’ve never been.” What unfolds is
an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless
physical and existential struggles against power and gendered
violence in “the eternal void of grief” (Victoria Chang, The
New York Times Magazine). Through intensely rhythmic lines marked
by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as
one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary
psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the
legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnes Varda, Francis
Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped
in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities
rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of
pain.
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY "Don Mee Choi's
urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of
those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and
past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War
cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this
bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and
hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical
imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to
witness, and to resist."--Judges Citation Woven from poems, prose,
photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de
force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts.
Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate
historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion
of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South
Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of
voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it
holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire
and a hope in humankind.
*Winner of The Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Lucien
Stryk Asian Translation Award* The title section of Kim Hyesoon's
powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine
poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit
roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The
poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during
Korea's violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim
calls "the structure of death, that we remain living in."
Autobiography of Death, Kim's most compelling work to date, at once
reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death-how we have died
and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of
mirrors, the plural "you" speaks as a body of multitudes that has
been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The
volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with "Face of
Rhythm," a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
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Yi Sang: Selected Works (Paperback)
Yi Sang; Edited by Don Mee Choi; Translated by Jack Jung, Sawako Nakayasu, Don Mee Choi, …
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R690
R585
Discovery Miles 5 850
Save R105 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works
were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world
literature in the early twentieth century and the political
upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended
prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as
one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean
literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist
master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays,
and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring
response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to
write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.
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Hardly War (Paperback)
Don Mee Choi
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R400
R344
Discovery Miles 3 440
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Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history,
national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's
father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam
wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal
relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are
inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring
empire. Like fried potato chips -- I believe so, utterly so -- The
hush-hush proving ground was utterly proven as history --
Hardly=History -- I believe so, eerily so -- hush hush -- Now watch
this performance -- Bull's-eye -- An uncanny human understanding on
target -- Absolute=History -- loaded with terrifying meaning -- The
Air Force doesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration -- Don Mee Choi is the
author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and
translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a
Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize.
Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream
(Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in
Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United
States via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.
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I'm Ok, I'm Pig! (Paperback)
Kim Hyesoon; Translated by Don Mee Choi
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R378
R309
Discovery Miles 3 090
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Kim Hyesoon is one of South Korea's most important contemporary
poets. She began publishing in 1979 and was one of the first few
women in South Korea to be published in Munhak kwa jisong
(Literature and Intellect), one of two key journals which
championed the intellectual and literary movement against the
US-backed military dictatorships of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo
Hwan in the 1970s and 80s. Don Mee Choi writes: 'Kim's poetry goes
beyond the expectations of established aesthetics and traditional
"female poetry" (yoryusi), which is characterised by its passive,
refined language. In her experimental work she explores women's
multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mothers, and
daughters in the context of Korea's highly patriarchal society, a
nation that is still under neo-colonial rule by the US. Kim's
poetics are rooted in her attempt to resist conventional literary
forms and language long defined by men in Korea. According to Kim,
"women poets oppose and resist their conditions, using
unconventional forms of language because their resistance has led
them to a language that is unreal, surreal, and even fantastical.
The language of women's poetry is internal, yet defiant and
revolutionary".'
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Siren (Some Poetics) (Paperback)
Quinn Latimer, Sarah Demeuse; Text written by Don Mee Choi, Ruth Estévez, Bernadette Mayer, …
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R830
R741
Discovery Miles 7 410
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Trilingual Renshi (Paperback)
Yasuhiro Yotsumoto Ming Di Don Mee Choi, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Hyesoon Kim
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R523
Discovery Miles 5 230
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