London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Event news: Kim Kyung-ju poetry tour

Kim Kyung JuKim Kyung Ju will be visiting the UK this month with his translator, Jake Levine, to take part in the events below. Kim’s first work to be published in English is I am a Season That Does Not Exist in This World, published by Black Ocean last year. His two plays and another poetry collection will be published in the US in 2018 and in 2019.

Tuesday 15 ​August, 7:00pm
Clinic 2017 Pamphlet Launch
Hannah Barry Gallery | 4 Holly Grove | London SE15 5DF
https://www.facebook.com/events/506174713074295/

Wednesday 16 August, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Clinic Presents Jake Levine and Kim Kyung Ju
Good Press | 5 St Margaret’s Place | Glasgow G1 5JY
https://www.facebook.com/events/137925930133977

Thursday 17 August, 7:30pm
Poetry: Sarah Crewe & Kim Kyung Ju
Wharf Chambers | Ground Floor | 23-25 Wharf Street | Leeds LS2 7EQ
https://www.facebook.com/events/207646363094632/

Friday 18 August 7:00pm
University of Hull | Hull HU6 7RX, UK

From the publisher’s website:

Kim Kyung Ju’s poetry operates in a world where no one seems to belong: “the living are born in the dead people’s world, and the dead are born in the living.” Already in its thirtieth edition in Korea, I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World is one of the most important books in the movement Korean critics have called Miraepa or future movement. Destructive forces like social isolation, disease, and ecological degradation are transformed into gateways to the sublime—where human action takes on the mythic and chaotic quality of nature. Conflating human agency with the natural order, Kim’s poems have been called by critics both a blessing and a curse to Korean literature. This book will be a startling English-language debut for one of the best-known poets writing in Korean today.

Jake Levine is the author of 2 chapbooks of poetry and is an editor at Spork Press. He is from Tucson.

“In his English-language debut, Korean poet and performance artist Kim calmly renders a world in which inert objects assume human traits, while humans themselves become mere traces. . . . .Several long poems weave through time and conflate temporal points, lending the collection a feeling of grander scale. Kim leaves his readers with a sense that there are bigger, more permanent things than people.”
—Publishers Weekly

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