Author: Kim Yideum
Translated by: Don Mee Choi, Johannes Göransson, Lee Jiyoon
Publisher: Action Books, 2016
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From the publisher’s website:
“In Kim Yideum‘s elegant and grotesque poetry, objective cool, violence and despairing megalomania all rage with the crystal-clear bitterness of vulnerability. When you read her beautiful, terrifying poems, you will go to pieces.”
— Aase Berg
“Kim Yi-Deum’s poetry is the landscape of confession. The confession flows inside the landscape and the landscape soars inside the confession.
These two elements of her poetry are interconnected in the way eros gets pulled up to the divine place.
Her poetry appears as poetry, it also appears as prose.
As poetry, it’s polyphonic, and as prose, it’s defiant.
Her poetry is the theater of multiple personality.
You hear the voices of hundreds of people, hundreds of things. These naked living things become her poetic subjects.
In each poem, the different sensations of each body are invented.
She punishes herself and accepts her own unsightly, gutless face.
Her poetry is engaged in the difficult process of discovering the other inside her.
Her rhythm, which emerges from the fishnet of interconnections, bites power and sets her free. “
— Kim Hyesoon