From the publisher’s website: Treasured in both Koreas, Baek Seok: Poems of the North opens an intriguing gateway into the spirit of the North Koreans of the 1930’s-50’s. In a land struggling for freedom and short of food, he treats his readers to the dishes they craved, exhibiting a Korea not in mired in the … [Read More]
Archives: Books (page 114)
Autobiography of Death
From the publisher’s website: The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary … [Read More]
Liking in Silence
From the publishers’ website: Kim Sa-in is a devotional poet who ably serves “all the unconsidered things in the world”–a cosmos flower, a turtle dove cooing near a firing range, the way a mourner offers a cup of wine to a widow. His eye for ordinary details that resonate in their new settings, his ability to … [Read More]
Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?
From the publisher’s website: Kim Eon Hee was born in 1953 in Jinju, Gyeongsang Province. She is the author of five volumes of poetry. Her first collection Modern Ars Poetica was published in 1989. Followed by, Trunk, The Girl who Sleeps Under a Withering Cherry Tree, Unexpected Response, and her latest from 2016 The Man I Miss. First published in … [Read More]
Bari’s Love Song
From the back cover: In her early career, Kang Eun-Gyo marked nihilism as the departure of her poetic imagination. In response to the turmoil of the world and modern Korean history full of violence and violations of human rights, the poet struggled to build her poetry in a house of nothingness. With Bari’s Love Song, … [Read More]
Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets
From the publisher’s website: Translating Feminisms showcases intimate collaborations and conversations between some of Asia’s most exciting women writers and emerging-star translators: contemporary poetry of labour and language, alongside essays exploring how, where and by whom feminist writing and women’s bodies are translated. Against Healing showcases poems by Kim Hyesoon, Choi Young-Mi, Kim Seon-U, Kim … [Read More]
Ten Thousand Lives
From the publisher’s website: Born in 1933 in a small rural village in Korea’s North Cholla Province, Ko Un grew up in a Japanese-controlled land that was soon to experience the horrors of the Korean War. He became a Buddhist monk in 1952, and began writing in the late 1950s. Ten Thousand Lives is his … [Read More]
Songs for Tomorrow: A Collection of Poems 1960-2002
From the publisher’s website: In this long awaited full survey of the poetic writing of Korea’s leading literary spokesperson, the translators have gathered poems from 42 years, representing numerous of the author’s 135 books. As they note in their introduction, “Ko Un is…like a force of nature.” Born in 1933 in southwestern Korea, he grew … [Read More]
Himalaya Poems
From the publisher’s website: In 1997, Korean poet Ko Un and a few companions spent forty days of rough traveling through Tibet, despite the fact that years before the poet had learned that an undiagnosed attack of tuberculosis in his youth had seriously damaged his lungs. Enduring terrible pain and near death, the poet survived … [Read More]
First Person Sorrowful
From the publisher’s website: Introduction by Sir Andrew Motion Ko Un has long been a living legend in Korea, both as a poet and as a person. Allen Ginsberg once wrote, ‘Ko Un is a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.’ When a writer has published as much as … [Read More]
Tokyo Ueno Station
From the publisher’s website: Finalist, the 2020 National Book Awards Winner, TA First Translation Prize Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Emperor, Kazu’s life is tied by a series of coincidences to Japan’s Imperial family and to one particular spot in Tokyo; the park near Ueno Station – the same place … [Read More]
Some Are Always Hungry
From the publisher’s website: Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Some Are Always Hungry chronicles a family’s wartime survival, immigration, and heirloom trauma through the lens of food, or the lack thereof. Through the vehicle of recipe, butchery, and dinner table poems, the collection negotiates the myriad ways diasporic communities comfort and name themselves … [Read More]
Korean Families Yesterday and Today
From the publisher’s website: Korean families have changed significantly during the last few decades in their composition, structure, attitudes, and function. Delayed and forgone marriage, fertility decline, and rising divorce rates are just a few examples of changes that Korean families have experienced at a rapid pace, more dramatic than in many other contemporary societies. … [Read More]
Rediscovering Korean Cinema
South Korean cinema is a striking example of non-Western contemporary cinematic success. Thanks to the increasing numbers of moviegoers and domestic films produced, South Korea has become one of the world’s major film markets. In 2001, the South Korean film industry became the first in recent history to reclaim its domestic market from Hollywood and … [Read More]
Uncomfortably Happily
From the publisher’s website: When the Gentler Pace and Stillness of the Countryside Replace the Roar of the City, but your Editor Keeps Calling With gorgeously detailed yet minimal art, cartoonist Yeon-Sik Hong explores his move with his wife to a small house atop a rural mountain, replacing the high-rent hubbub of Seoul with the … [Read More]
Bad Friends
From the publisher’s website: Pearl is bad. She smokes, drinks, runs away from home, and has no qualms making her parents worry. Her mother and sister beg her to be a better student, sister, daughter; her beleaguered father expresses his concerns with his fists. Bad Friends is set in the 1990s in a South Korea torn between tradition … [Read More]