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Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)2024 Poetry Book Society Translation ChoiceKim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more. 'Reads like a variety of horror - haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic. ... In Kim's metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power.' New York Times, The Best Poetry of 2023
About the author
Kim Hyesoon has won major acclaim in Korea and internationally and, in Don Mee Choi’s English translation, has won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the first time a translated title has won the award. Kim’s poetry has been translated into many languages.Don Mee Choi is a translator and highly innovative poet. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Incorporating archives, photographs and fragments of memory, Choi’s poetry explores historical events and the human impact of war. Her books include DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Summary
Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA) Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.
