Glory Hole | London Korean Links

Author: Kim Hyun
Translated by: Archana Madhavan, Suhyun J Ahn
Publisher: Seagull Books, 2022
Original title: 글로리 홀, 2014
Link to online store *

A ground-breaking new collection of queer poetry from a leading contemporary Korean poet.

Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection. Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim’s fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making. His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures. They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithetical to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns. After all, like LGBTQ+ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence. Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyun’s form. Glory Hole invites readers into a very queer world.

Source: publisher’s website

Entry on Goodreads.com here.

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