Author: Kim Hyesoon
Translated by: Don Mee Choi
Publisher: Action Books, 2011
Original title: 전 세계의 쓰레기여 단결하라!, 1994
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The celebrated Korean poet Kim Hyesoon writes from a radiant black zone where matter becomes dark matter, human becomes trinket, garbage becomes god, a zero-point for our present moment’s grotesque and spectacular inversions. This volume includes a selection of recent work, the landmark poem “Manhole Humanity,” and the essay “In the Oxymoronic World.” With fiercely incisive translations and a preface by Don Mee Choi.
“Kim Hyesoon writes flowingly and choreographically a panorama of hovering hatelove for the birthing body, for cruelty and existence and for the expansive thinking and dizzyingly borderless universe-geography. Kim Hyesoon writes hatelove as a stone-hard feminist life-and-death dance. As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!”
– Aase Berg
“Miraculous weaponry! Miraculous translations! This kind of undomesticated engagement and lawlessness and risk and defiance and somatic exorbitance posits a world and a relation to the world where everything excluded is included—the animal and the vegetal, the molten and the mineral, the gaseous and the liquid, not to mention shame, disgust, failure, terror, raunch. The final poem “Manhole Humanity” deserves its place alongside Césarire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” or Ginsberg’s “Howl” or Inger Christensen’s It. Kim Hyesoon’s new book is armament and salve, shield and medicinal chant. It’s here to protect us”
– Christian Hawkey
Source: publisher’s website