Present Tense Complex

The poems in this fearless debut, which entangle themes of identity, family, gender, and landscape, are gorgeous, elliptical, and delightfully strange. “Her softening grip of reality. / As if capsized, hull forced into the cold / current, she was out of the blue beautiful. // No more cranes akimbo in the midst of poems / now barren of flowers as hardcore porn. // Still you keep an eye out for the foreshadowing / of their white wings against the floral gore.” Suphil Lee Park’s transmissions are equal parts lush and violent. Present Tense Complex bridges the beautiful and the grotesque to access a new view of human loneliness.

Suphil Lee Park spent 9⁄14 of her life all over the Korean peninsula before landing in the American Northeast. Her name 수필 리 박 (秀筆 李 朴) consists of Chinese characters, each of which means “outstanding,” “writing brush,” “plum tree,” and “silver magnolia.” She graduated from New York University with a BA in English and from the University of Texas at Austin with an MFA in Poetry. Her poems and short stories appear in Colorado Review, Global Poetry Anthology, Image, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, the Iowa Review, and the Massachusetts Review, among many others. She’s a literary agent who champions contemporary Korean writers. You can find more about her at: suphil-lee-park.com.

Source: publisher’s website