Don Mee Choi

PHANTOM PAIN WINGS Poetry by Kim Hyesoon

Translated by Don Mee Choi, New Directions 2023

2023 WINNER OF NBCC Award in POETRY

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“Kim’s new translated work, “Phantom Pain Wings,” is heavy with birds and verbs. “It’s an I-do-bird sequence,” Kim writes. As the second book in her death trilogy, it responds to the loss of her father and the traumas of his generation: colonization, war, and economic development at all costs.” — in “Kim Hyesoon’s Animal Obsessions” by E. Tammy Kim, The New Yorker July 2023

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To read Kim’s Phantom Pain Wings is to enter a parallel world in which the agonies of a rigidly gendered society are exteriorized and animated, stripped of polite society decorum, transformed into a faintly ridiculous yet vicious parable of talking animals, such as a sadistic, mansplaining owl, and interiorized again as a stationary figure, violated and sightless, “a female owl perched on a female tree,” the aggrieved inversion of Minerva’s owl of wisdom and night vision. -- David Woo, On the Seawall May 2024

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“Her poetics also invest in boredom, frustration, and repetition, in the way that life at its most repetitive may most adroitly harbor certain death. To try to describe her work is to try to create a paradigm in which to understand it when, like Roland Barthes’s neutral, the work constantly undoes the paradigm.” — Youna Kwak, “Death Inside Poetry,” Poetry Foundation, April 2023

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“To describe the negatively-charged galactic glamor of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, pulsating in Don Mee Choi's fiberoptic (English) robe, is a difficult task for those raised in the anhedonic supermarket aisles of US poetry. This is because Kim Hyesoon's work mobilizes a cosmology of icons that Western, and most other, literary cultures reject: garbage, cooking odors, hair, holes, pigs, rats. Such anti-icons—associated with the feminine, the domestic, animals, and illness—rise as rich, ambivalent phenomena in her night sky: subliminal, profuse, in motion, blacked out.” — Joyelle McSweeney, “How I Became a Rat,” Poetry Foundation April 2023

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“Bird Rider, you have made a most painful descent. When I hear you I hear the pattern of mourning as well as the pattern of regeneration. The beating of absent wings in transgression. Hope to die and stick a needle in my eye. Listening to your weeping. Seeing your death sentence, over and over. Please write soon. I’ll look for you in the updraft.” — Jeffrey Yang, “Dear Bird Rider,” Poetry Foundation April 2023

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In this vertiginous process of doing bird, what clearly comes to mind is Kim’s resistance to “aboutness” in her writing. There is no way to tell from this poem if she is writing explicitly about a mourner, a shaman, a bird, a butterfly, or maybe all of them, or none at all. Omitting details in this way, the poem points us to the only thing that is of significance—the very place Kim writes from. Through her poetry of deliberate obfuscation, it is as if Kim is assuring us that she will continue writing from the death-like non-space where grief and pain accumulate, intermingle, and proliferate, no matter what the afflictions entail and who the afflicted are. — Tammy Lee, CHA Journal

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Through Don Mee Choi’s extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Kim’s art—a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism—yield ‘a low note no one has ever sung before.’

—Citation for the Griffin Poetry Prize for Autobiography of Death

Winged ventriloquy—a powerful new poetry collection channeling the language of birds by South Korea’s most innovative contemporary writer

“This book is about the realization of / I-thought-bird-was-part-of-me-but-Iwas-part-of-bird sequence / It’s a delayed record of such a sequence.”

An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an “I-do-bird-sequence,” where “Bird-human is the ‘I.’” Her remarkable essay “Bird Rider” explains: “I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I’ve never been.” What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in “the eternal void of grief” (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine). Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.

CHICAGO REVIEW 64:04/65:01 Contemporary Korean Poetry

Curated by Don Mee Choi

Critical essays: Stephen Hong Sohn and Youna Kwak

Visual Art: Fi Jae Lee & Yi Yunyi

Korean Poetry—

Yi Sang (trans. Jack Jung), from Crow’s Eye View; 1993, 6, 1; Girl

Kim Suyŏng (trans. Young-Jun Lee), Grass, Petals 2, Phone Talk, Thawing, Wasŏn [Reclined Zen Meditation]

Kim Hyesoon (trans. Don Mee Choi, David Krolikoski, & Emily Jungmin Yoon), My Day, to Be Wiped Out by the Mighty Sun Eraser; Crow’s Eye View 31; Again, I Need to Ask Poor Yi Sang

Yi Won (trans. Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, & E.J. Koh), For the Mirror; The Mirror Runs Away; Dark and Bulging TV and Me; The Landscape’s End; A Night at the Gas Station

Kim Haengsook (trans. Mia You), Happy New Year; April 16, 1914; Another Observatory; Unification Observatory 2015; Landmark

Stephen Hong Sohn, Across the Divides: Korean Poetry and Korean American Translators

Song Seunghwan (trans. Jack Jung), Cyclamen; Chloroform; Geranium; Pear Blossoms; Looking for Ox

Choi Seungja (trans. Won-Chung Kim & Cathy Park Hong), Already, the World; Spring; So on a Certain Day, Love; The Portrait of Mr. Pon Kagya; Phone Bells Keep Ringing For Me

Kim Eon Hee ( trans. Sung Gi Kim & Eunsong Kim), As Soon as I Bite the Mouth Gag; (Whisperingly); Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?; EX. 1) Carefully read the answers on the next page, and create proper questions out of your answers. (Describe in short answer form); Playing with Fireworks on the Moon 1

Lee Soho (trans. Soje), Song of Utmost Filial Piety; Narrow, Even More Cramped, and

Rather Concise; Kyungjin’s Home—A spider web; Kyungjin’s Home—A studio apartment; Kyungjin’s Home—A game of toadie, toadie

Yoo Heekyung (trans. Stine Su Yon An), boy ivan; when i put my neck inside a t-shirt i think; your place; the umbrella’s hometown; K

Lee Young-ju (trans. Jae Kim), The Girl Throws; Mooncoming; A Girl and the Moon; Infinity; Anniversary

Kim Un (trans. Anton Hur), Apple Bomb; Sick Person; Alone or No One; Real Poets

Youna Kwak, Answering the Call: Beyond Resistance and Liberation

Fi Jae Lee & Yi Yunyi, Visual Portfolio

YI SANG: SELECTED WORKS (Wave Books, Fall 2020)

Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese occupied Korea. While his life ended prematurely at the age of twenty-seven, Yi Sang’s work endures as one of the great revolutionary legacies of modern Korean literature. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this carefully curated selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.

Yi Sang (1910-1937) was a painter, architect, poet and writer of 1930s Korea, when Korean peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule. Yi Sang wrote and published in both Korean and Japanese until his early death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven, after imprisonment by Japanese police for thought crimes in Tokyo. His work shows innovative engagement with European modernism, especially that of Surrealism and Dada. He is considered one of the most experimental writers of Korean modernism.

Yi Sang’s poems and essays translated from the Korean by Jack Jung; Yi Sang’s poems translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu; Yi Sang’s short stories co-translated by Joyelle McSweeney and Don Mee Choi; co-editors: Joshua Beckman and Don Mee Choi.

Winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work, 2020.

REVIEWS:

The question of speech and empire, and what language a colonial subject should use, is a constant subtext in the poems, essays, and fiction of the avant-garde modernist Yi Sang…his mélange of East Asian and European styles helped formulate an artistic model for subverting the empire from within.—E. Tammy Kim, The Nation

Yi Sang, Korean literature’s perpetual enfant terrible, was not only a cutting-edge writer but a working architect, and his oeuvre teems with dark rooms, mirror worlds, and other uncanny spaces.—Ed Park, The New York Review

Over eight decades after his death, Yi Sang’s influence on global literature has grown steadily through translation efforts, and he has become known as one of the most resourceful poetic tinkerers facing colonial adversity, material hardship, and political disfavor. He belongs not just with the likes of Gertrude Stein, André Breton, and James Joyce, but also Oswald de Andrade, Jean Toomer, and Aimé Césaire, writers who believed that the logic of the avant-garde need not be determined by patterns of economic or industrial advancement. Yi Sang’s artistic vanguard was ultimately wrought of a desire to shatter conventions of perception and feeling.—Spencer Lee-Lenfield, Guernica

With the release of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), English-language readers can chart their own journeys of paranoid wonder. The volume boasts over 200 pages of translated poetry, essays, and fiction, organized into four sections. Jack Jung tackles the Korean-language poems and essays; Sawako Nakayasu covers the Japanese language poetry; Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney collaborate over his fiction. But there is more to this division of labor than boundaries of language and genre. The volume includes essays from the translators, who speak in voices at once scholarly and personal, urgent and elegiac. — Jae Won Edward Chung, Asymptote

What can I say about these glimpses into this poet, who I would and could not have encountered were it not for this book? This book has put me in intimate relation with a soul that chose to cast itself into ever new and disposable lives.— Amanda Auerbach, Harvard Review

His literature is like a series of psychic snapshots, endlessly layered with impossible detail of memory and history. — John Venegas, Angel City Review

The wide dimensions of Yi Sang’s poems’ mirrors will engulf readers inside surreal anatomies of life and death. His poems often bring outsiders in, only to be left still feeling like an outsider on the inside. — Paul Cunningham, Kenyon Review

Poems by Kim Hyesoon (New Directions, 2018)

Translated by Don Mee Choi

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 death—how we die 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. New Directions, 2018

Autobiography of Death won the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize and ALTA’s 2019 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize

2019 Griffin Poetry Prize International Shortlist:

Judges Citation:

“In the grievous wake of the Sewol Ferry incident of 2014, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon composed a cycle of forty-nine poems – one for each day the dead must await reincarnation – to produce a harrowing work of shock, outrage, and veneration for the children lost to this disaster. Through Don Mee Choi’s extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Kim’s art – a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism – yield ‘a low note no one has ever sung before.’ That otherworldly tone may sound like life itself, the poet sings, ‘for even death can’t enter this deep inside me.’”

Audio of “Day Nine” in Korean, English, German: Stoff aus Luft

Reviews:

“…Kim once submitted a play to government censors for review, only to have it returned with everything but the title blacked out. Autobiography of Death reads like a deranged diary…” —April Yee in The Times Literary Supplement

“The most instructive line ever uttered about the contemporary South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon (born 1955) comes courtesy of the poet herself…KIM: Death, Woman, [South] Korea, You, Seoul, Absence, Illness, Rats, Poetry.” —Christopher Spaide in Denver Quarterly Review Vol 53, no. 2, 2019.

“Questions of the agency and effects of death, in both individual and mass tragedies, are central to this extraordinary collective elegy from Kim…it fully reveals the startling architecture Kim develops to display structural horrors, individual loss, and the links between them.”  Publishers Weekly

“In forty-nine poems, each representing a day, Kim captures death’s cycle between life and reincarnation: pages filled with wings and shadows, female laughter and weeping, bloody rabbits and dead mothers.” Madeline Vardell in The Arkansas International

“All refracted through individual bodies/lives which disintegrate, reshape themselves, are invaded by and themselves invade other bodies/beings — In the corner of Mommy’s heart, a small black vole lifts its head — always focused on the particular, not on anyone’s story-line. Boundaries disappear. “ Judith Roitman in Galatea Resurrects

“For Kim, poetry is a place in which “names are never called out. It’s a place where names are erased…To write poetry is to witness the names that die inside poetry.” Rather than attempting to bridge (and therefore, like “bridge” translations, disappear) the gaps within language and living—between life and death, self and other, absence and presence, memory and future—that Kim’s work has always alerted us to, Autobiography of Death recognizes the possibilities of preserving the gap—of inhabiting the gap, the gutter.” Lotte L.S. in Ploughshares

Poems by Kim Hyesoon (Action Books, April 2016)

Translated by Don Mee Choi

Reviews:

"The monstrous body remains a vital figure in these poems, and Kim’s speaker assumes imaginative and precise postures of disfigurement." --Publishers Weekly

"Poor Love Machine exists, exploring the way extreme states of dispossession can co-exist with fortitude, the grotesque with tenderness. Kyesoon’s explores an outsider position where voices merge easily with their other, where no identity is fully in possession of itself.." by Alexis Almeida in Asymptote

Praises: "Kim Hyesoon is Korea's most important living poet and by far its most imaginative writer... she and Don Mee Choi have become the most important writer-translator partnership in Korea in the new millennium." Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, University of British Columbia

"Kim Hyesoon portrays a panorama of hovering love-hate feelings for the birthing body and for the cruelty of existence, creating an expansively conceived and dizzyingly borderless cosmic geography." Aase Berg

"I first heard Kim Hyesoon at Poetry Parnassus, the global festival of poetry which took place in London’s Olympic year. Kim Hyesoon shared the stage with Seamus Heaney. It was the last time I heard Seamus Heaney read in public and the first time I heard Kim Hyesoon, and even at the time it felt momentous.... the birdlike Kim Hyesoon wove a pattern of poems, so strangely compelling and curious, and utterly unlike anything I had heard before.” Sasha Dugdale, Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation

"Don Mee Choi's dynamic translation brings Hyesoon's miserable, beautiful body into English pungent and fresh, both alive and dead. Her informative introduction provides readers in English the context to interpret these poems as responses to patriarchal, neoliberal, neocolonial control, at once resistance to and inscription of the trauma inflicted by that control." Molly Weigel, translator of In The Moremarrow by Oliverio Girondo

"In Kim, the body is inextricably and painfully knitted into the industrial landscape...In this topology, darkness governs. But Kim sides with darkness." Joel Scott, Cordite

"While most people seem blinded by Capital, [Kim Hyesoon] shines her spotlight on things that are dark and absurd, the comic and horrifying at the same time." Swedish Public Television

Selected poems by Kim Hyesoon (Bloodaxe Books, 2014)

Translated by Don Mee Choi

The book consists of selections from Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, All the Garbage of the World, Unite!, and Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream. 

Reviews:

"Since 1980, Kim Hyesoon has broken the rigid gender traditions of Korean poetry. Unconfined by the so-called “feminine” subjects of love and loss, she creates a seething, imaginative under- and over-world where myth and politics, the everyday and the fabulous, bleed into each other. Her enormously energetic poems are full of dizzying transitions and tonal shifts" – Sean O'Brien, Independent.

"[Kim] Hyesoon’s poetry is like nothing I’ve ever read before." - Katherine Stansfield, Poetry Wales.

Poems by Kim Hyesoon (Action Books, 2014)

Translated by Don Mee Choi

Finalist 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Book trailer by Paul Cunningham, 2014

"Experimental Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s work is shocking, liberating, brutal, grotesque, burlesque, gurlesque. Published by the aptly-named Action Books, Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream has Kim’s longtime translator Don Mee Choi bringing this into an English that will not only jolt readers, but hopefully jolt them out of a stagnant vision of what Korean and Asian poetry represents: We return as hot pigs / We return for our final act / The act in which our fingers even before we lie down in our coffins"  - Erica Mena, ALTA Blog

"Kim Hyesoon’s fearless poetics suggests a grossly visceral alternative to the capitalist world. These poems conjure both feelings of desire and disgust, awe and repulsion. I want to read more. I need it. Please stop. Don’t stop. You make me sick." - Christine Shan Shan Hou, Hyperallergic, April 2014

"...in Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, and we often are left asking ourselves who is acting on whom, who is speaking for whom. Choi’s translations excel, in fact, in how she allows the language to perplex us; she is unafraid of sacrificing the coherence of English grammar if she can maintain a trace of Kim’s linguistic play. In the book’s opening poem, “Dear Choly, from Melan,” Kim not only personifies melancholy, she splits it into two separate and not always compatible, nor complementary, beings:

Melan covered herself with a cloud, Choly with a shadow

Melan endured the wind, Choly clung to the sea

Melan said It’s flesh-scented, Choly said It’s water-scented

Melan disliked sunlight, Choly’s feet were cold

Melan didn’t eat, Choly didn’t drink

I was absent with Melan ate, also when Choly drank water

- Mia You, Bookforum, September 2014

Poems by Kim Hyesoon (Action Books, 2011)

Translated by Don Mee Choi

Received the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize:

“...Choi’s translation takes us someplace new in language. The book is filled with unforgettable turns of phrase, visionary solutions to difficult language problems, and a flow of individual poems that unites in a seamless whole.” - Stryk Prize selection committee.

Reviews: 

Manhole Humanity, the final poem in Kim Hyesoon’s collection All the Garbage of the World, Unite! excellently translated by Don Mee Choi and published by Action Books in 2011, is a poem of such life-consuming, life-barfing, life-giving, life-gulping intensity, I’ve fallen into its hole trying to choose a line or two from which to begin talking about it. - Ellen Welcker, The Quarterly Conversation, Fall 2012

"Miraculous weaponary! Miraculous translations! This kind of undomesticated engagement and lawlessness and risk and defiance and somatic exorbitance posits a world and a relation to the world where everything excluded is included--the animal and the vegetal, the molten and the mineral, the gaseous and the liquid, not to mention shame, disgust, failure, terror, raunch. The final poem "Manhole Humanity" deserves its place alongside Cesaire's "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land" or Ginsberg's "Howl" or Inger Christensen's It. Kim Hyesoon's new book is armament and salve, shield and medicinal chant. It's here to protect us. - Christian Hawkey

Poems by Kim Hyesoon (Action Books, 2008)

Translated by Don Mee Choi

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.

Reviews: 

"Kim’s poems, whether lineated or in prose, whether mythic or idiosyncratic (though rarely only one of these for long), reside at precisely those places between what the body is and what it is not, between the corporeal machinery by which meaning is generated and the meanings which thus emerge, tethered to the body by a string of cat guts and vibrating words." Jessica Lawson, Jacket2

Read Kim Hyesoon's poem "Why Can't We" in Guernica

"A Sublime Kitchen" in Poetry International Web

Published by Zephyr Press, 2006

Poems by Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju

Translated and edited by Don Mee Choi

Anxiety of Words is the first anthology of Korean women's poetry that challenges one of Korea's most enduring literary traditions: that “yoryu” (female) poetry must be gentle and subservient. By using innovative language, and vividly depicting women's lives and struggles within an often repressive society, these three contemporary poets defiantly insist that poetry can be part of social change—indeed, that it must be. Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju have written unforgettable poems that now, thanks to Don Mee Choi's translations, are available to English-speaking readers for the first time. With a lengthy introduction on the history of women's poetry in Korea, and biographical notes on the three poets, this volume is an eye-opening exploration for any reader interested in Korea, poetry, and contemporary women's literature.

Reviews:

“Don Mee Choi, a fine poet herself, has translated both the spirit and words of these outsiders and experimenters into poetry that is just as striking to English-speakers as it was to Koreans under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee when it was first written. Anxiety of Words has widened the conversation of Korean poetry to include the voice of Korean women—a voice that needs to be heard.”
—American Poet, Spring 2007

“The gravity of the situation in Anxiety of Words is unmistakable. Choi’s work renders each human voice distinctly, with a consistent precision and grace that makes the struggles of a people feel personal. It’s a thrilling achievement, and hopefully only the beginning of Choi’s presentation of these extraordinary poets.” – Travis Nichols, The Brooklyn Rail, Spring 2007

 “These poems force me to imagine cities I've never visited, and to see those cities echoed throughout the landscape… They teach me how to listen, and to look.” –Jamison Crabtree, DIAGRAM, 2016

Poems by Kim Hyesoon (Tinfish, 2005)

Translated by Don Mee Choi

Design by Eric Butler

The poems in When the Plug Gets Unplugged, by prominent Korean poet, Kim Hyesoon, are spoken by rats, rats who forage, rats endangered by human beings, rats who listen to people die in a collapsing department store–rats who are, in other words, the voices of modern Seoul, or (to risk the pun) the modern soul. Kim Hyesoon’s work is only know receiving the attention it deserves in the United States, due to the efforts of her fine translator, Don Mee Choi. Anyone interested in poetry from Korea, or poetry written in a distinctive voice, should read this collection.  Tinfish Press

Essays by Kim Hyesoon

Translated by Don Mee Choi

Published by Tinfish Press, February 2012

Tinfish’s eleventh Retro Chapbook presents three brief essays by prominent Korean feminist poet, Kim Hyesoon. These essays are about being a woman poet in a patriarchal society. But they are not about the everyday struggles of the poet; instead, they engage issues of femininity and inspiration by way of shaman songs and heroine myths. And so “it becomes possible to explain why the women-poets of South Korea enjoy overlapping the space of the real with the space of illusions.”