Author: Lim Solah
Translated by: Oh Eunkyung, Olan Munson
Publisher: Black Ocean, 2022
Original title: 괴괴한 날씨와 착한 사람들, 2017
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A debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by award-winning South Korean poet and novelist Lim Solah. By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a simple vernacular, Lim’s lyric I struggles with the poet’s call to “wonder” in a world lurking with quiet dissonance and horror. Many of these poems incorporate elements of drama and fiction, including documentary, collapsing the boundaries between the imaginary and the real as they explore the writer’s relationship with multitudinous versions of her many selves. While BTS light up the charts and Korean films gather international awards, Lim’s poems paint a strange and disorienting map of the consciousness of the so-called “spec” generation that calls their country Hell Chosun.
Lim Solah is a writer from South Korea. She is the author of the novel The Best Life (Munhakdongnae 2015), the poetry collection Get Packing (Hyeondaemunhak 2020), and the short story collection Snow, Person and Snowperson (Munhakdongnae 2019). She is the recipient of numerous awards such as the JoongAng New Writer’s Award for Poetry, Sin Dong-yup Prize for Literature, and the Moonji Literary Award. Lim received the Arts Council Korea’s Young Art Frontier Grant in 2014.
Olan Munson is a freelance translator and graduate of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Munson is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
Oh Eunkyung is a freelance translator and graduate of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Based in Germany, Oh works to introduce contemporary Korean writers to an international readership.
Source: publisher’s website