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Poetry. In UNDER FLAG, winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized. "Myung Mi Kim's languange is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge"-Kathleen Fraser. Third Printing.
"The poems in Commons are at once global and intensely personal and emotional. An immensely talented poet, Myung Mi Kim loves language - its internal rhymes, alliterations, and diverse rhythms. Caught off guard by the beauty and precision of Kim's language and the exquisite images she so deftly conjures, we are drawn unwittingly into a web of fragmentary memories that subvert what we think we know about the violent history that haunts her and never ceases to demand recognition."--Elaine Kim, author of Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, and co-editor of Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism
Conceived as one poem, Myung Mi Kim's Dura is a whirling experimental symphony of images, forms and rhythms assembled and juxtaposed to translate the experience and gestures of the Korean immigrant woman surviving in America at the end of the twentieth century. Its language negotiates a past -- "How was it to be the first arrivals in rows and columns" -- as well as a present -- "A perceiver without a state", and has already gained Kim recognition as among the most moving and important "translators" in contemporary poetry.
"The poems in Commons are at once global and intensely personal and emotional. An immensely talented poet, Myung Mi Kim loves language - its internal rhymes, alliterations, and diverse rhythms. Caught off guard by the beauty and precision of Kim's language and the exquisite images she so deftly conjures, we are drawn unwittingly into a web of fragmentary memories that subvert what we think we know about the violent history that haunts her and never ceases to demand recognition."—Elaine Kim, author of Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, and co-editor of Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism
In Penury, Myung Mi Kim probes sanctioned norms of cognition by breaking communication into its most discrete components. With these irruptions and suspensions, she writes into extremes of forced loss, violence, and impoverishment. Exposing latent relations in sound and sense, Kim proposes how new ethical awareness can be encountered where the word and its meaning/s are formed. Here, language is not offered as transparent communication of ideas, but as testament to and disruption of oppressive dominant concepts and cultural practices. Penury means poverty, but in this text's radical relation to lack, we hear the most elemental and active forms of change.
In Civil Bound, Myung Mi Kim turns a keen ear to language as the mechanism by which society operates. The poems engage multiple methods to make sense of this pervasive tool, its powers, nuances, and influences over the structure of our civilizations. Through investigations of ecology, capitalism, military powers, colonialization, and supremacy, the book uncovers patterns in the ways that language is active in perpetuating inequality and binding its subjects to the will of those in positions of authority. In questioning systems of oppression, the poems also offer the hope of forging new paths through the connecting power of language. Examining our participation in social contracts, communal goals, and human desires, Kim's poems encourage us to salvage language as a means of connection that binds us in respect and commitment to our fellow human beings.
Walt Whitman called the Orient "The Past! the Past! the Past!" but East Asia was remarkably present for the United States in the twentieth century. Apparitions of Asia reads American literary expressions during a century of U.S.-East Asian alliances in which the Far East is imagined as both near and contemporary. Commercial and political bridges across the Pacific generated American literary fantasies of ethical and spiritual accord; Park examines American bards who capitalized on these ties and considers the price of such intimacies for Asian American poets. l l The book begins its literary history with the poetry of Ernest Fenollosa, who called for "The Future Union of East and West." From...
Since the 1980s, poets in Canada and the U.S. have increasingly turned away from the use of English, bringing multiple languages into dialogue—and into conflict—in their work. This growing but under-studied body of writing differs from previous forms of multilingual poetry. While modernist poets offered multilingual displays of literary refinement, contemporary translingual poetries speak to and are informed by feminist, anti-racist, immigrant rights, and Indigenous sovereignty movements. Although some translingual poems have entered Chicanx, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous literary canons, translingual poetry has not yet been studied as a cohesive body of writing. The first book-...
At a time when wars, acts of terrorism, and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism, misogyny, and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse, language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity, and they negotiate ways to understand poetics, or the role of the poetic, in relation to language, the body politic, the human body, breath, the bodies of the natural environment, and the body of form. Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry a...
Poetry. "SWOLE full y'all--of what flotsam language is when time comes to name the wrongs befalling (some of) us. A songbook of catastrophes--these, big as bodies, small as cities--Marchan's reeling debut is the real thing. She washed her lines in Katrina's filthy water till they smeared into gendercrit mondegreens, broad dialects, Yung Crank's crunk-ass barz, and syntax that's at once saturated and eroded. Reckoning the wreckage, she writes: 'after the rain has left my room coldish / ... I light / candles makes me feel / oceanic or just salty'--vast and pissed, deep and caustic, SWOLE near bursts with poetry."--Douglas Kearney "Against the impulse to 'draw lines as a kind of forgetting,' Je...