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"Don Mee Choi is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid essays, and an award-winning translator of contemporary Korean women's poetry. In this pamphlet, Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, she explores translation and language in the context of US imperialism--through the eyes of a "foreigner;" a translator; a child in Timoka, the made-up city of Ingmar Bergman's The Silence; a child from a neocolony."--Publisher's website (viewed 2021 February 10)
"A new book by Don Mee Choi that includes poems, prose, and images"--
Documents of war by Choi's father fuel her second collection of poetry, a passionate and personal defiance of nationalism.
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020). 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 violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi's DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a 'magnetic field of memory,' proving that history doesn't merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire. "
Poetry. East Asia Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. The celebrated Korean poet Kim Hyesoon writes from a radiant black zone where matter becomes dark matter, human becomes trinket, garbage becomes god, a zero-point for our present moment's grotesque and spectacular inversions. This volume includes a selection of recent work, the landmark poem "Manhole Humanity," and the essay "In the Oxymoronic World." With fiercely incisive translations and a preface by Don Mee Choi. "As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real " Aase Berg"
Poetry. Asian Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. The first full-length English language edition of one of the foremost woman poets in Modern Korean poetry. Kim Hyesoon was the first woman recipient of the prestigious Kim Suyong Contemporary Poetry Award, and is the author of eight collections of poetry. In Kim Hyesoon's saturated political fables, horror is packed inside cuteness, cuteness inside horror. Interior and exterior, political and intimate, human and animal, agent and victim become interchangeable, interbreeding elements. No subjecthood is fixed in this microscape of shifts, swellings, tender subjugations and acts of cruel selflessness
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. For decades, Kim Hyesoon--a leading figure in contemporary Korean poetry and trans-national feminist literature--has represented the capabilities of a poet who works across, around, and through the borders of nations and of language itself. Many of her works have been translated, with the overwhelming support from Don Mee Choi, into English. With visceral and surreal imagery, Kim presents us her latest work in translation, POOR LOVE MACHINE, with a rippling array of pain, desire, and light.
Kim Hyesoon’s poems “create a seething, imaginative under-and over-world where myth and politics, the everyday and the fabulous, bleed into each other” (Sean O’Brien, The Independent) *Winner of The Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award* 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 history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with “Face of Rhythm,” a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
Poetry. East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women" Pam Brown"
Poems.