From one of the sharpest up-and-coming voices in contemporary poetry, a stunning collection that explores our most fundamental instincts, capacity for affection, and the ways in which we resemble the wild Find Me as the Creature I Am is a book full of tenderness and violence, longing and love. Ranging from inherited family tales to … [Read More]
Booklist: Poetry in English
Mirror Nation [forthcoming]
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War and the National Book Award–winning DMZ Colony. Much like Proust’s madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi’s Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the … [Read More]
Exilée and Temps Morts: Selected Works
In her radical exploration of cultural and personal identity, the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha sought “the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.” Her first book, the highly original postmodern text Dictee, is now an internationally studied work of autobiography. This volume, spanning the period between 1976 and … [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]
DMZ Colony
From the publisher’s website: Winner of the National Book Award Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said’s notion of “the intertwined … [Read More]
Notes from the North
Notes from the North is horrific, powerful, and astute, full of passion and moral authority. Although weve heard about the brutal dictatorship of North Korea before, these poems surpass journalism and bring us the voices on the brink, with the compelling urgency of a diary of contemporary tyranny and the havoc it wreaks. This is a … [Read More]
A Cruelty Special to Our Species
From the publisher’s website: A piercing debut collection of poems exploring gender, race, and violence from a sensational new talent In her arresting collection, urgently relevant for our times, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon confronts the histories of sexual violence against women, focusing in particular on Korean so-called “comfort women,” women who were forced into sexual labor in … [Read More]
Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems
A provocative and furious book about race, culture, identity and what it means to be an inter-country adoptee in America Julayne Lee was born in South Korea to a mother she never knew. When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up. Not … [Read More]
A Lesser Love
A Lesser Love presents poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, and even national citizens. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh describes her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. The spirit of … [Read More]
Ordinary Misfortunes
From the publisher’s website: Korea continues to grapple with the shared memory of its Japanese and US occupations. The poems in Ordinary Misfortunes incorporate actual testimony about cruelty against vulnerable bodies—including the wianbu, euphemistically known as “comfort women” —as the poet seeks to find places where brutality is overcome through true human connections. [Read More]
Hardly War
From the publisher’s website: Hardly War, Don Mee Choi’s major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi’s father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to … [Read More]
An Empty House: Korean-American Poetry
From the publisher’s website: A sequel to Fragrance of Poetry, a much acclaimed poetry collection, An Empty House contains ninety-four poems by twelve Korean-American poets. It is a work that represents significant thought, effort, and collaboration. Poems in this volume show the breadth and depth of Korean-American poets’ homesickness, grief, pain, and joy of life … [Read More]
Fragrance of Poetry: Korean-American Literature
From the publisher’s website: Fragrance of Poetry contains seventy-five poems by fifteen Korean-American poets. These poets are all first-generation immigrants from Korea whose primary language is Korean. Naturally, the poems in this book show the Korean immigrants’ solitude, nostalgia, pathos, anger, laughter, and love. They are cross-cultural communications from Korea to America, with the themes … [Read More]
Surfacing Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Literature 1903-2003
This book is published to commemorate the centennial of the first landing of Korean immigrants in America in 1903. An anthology of poems, essays and short stories by thirty-seven Korean-American writers, Surfacing Sadness is the first serious effort to bring together the Korean-American literary experiences to join mainstream American literature. The book primarily contains translations … [Read More]
Notes from the Divided Country
In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts a number of difficult subjects: colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, … [Read More]