Author: Choi Seung-ja
Translated by: Cathy Park Hong, Kim Won-Chung
Publisher: Action Books, 2020
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This volume selects poems of many decades by one of the most startling, distinctive, and influential feminist voices in contemporary Korean poetry. Against the limits society would erect around her, Choi Seungja’s poetry trains a keen attention on everyday objects and situations until loneliness, time, emptiness, love, death and even brief-lived delight glow with uncanny luster. Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong’s translations accentuate the simplicity and boldness of Choi’s vision, her perfect aim.
Choi Seungja, a poet most admired by Kim Hyesoon, is one of the most influential feminist poets of South Korea. Choi’s poetry shattered many boundaries that have kept women silent on literary, social, and political levels. Her powerful, abrasive language aims at South Korea’s dictatorships, capitalism, and its willingly subordinate stance under the U.S. Action Books breaks ground once again by bringing us Cathy Park Hong’s and Won-Chung Kim’s fierce translation of Choi’s poetry that relentlessly battles against patriarchy and political oppression.
—Don Mee Choi, author of DMZ Colony
Source: publisher’s website