Book record
A Drink of Red Mirror
Kim Hyesoon
Translated from Korean by Jiwon Shin, Lauren Albin, Sue Hyon Bae
A Drink of Red Mirror, by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Jiwon Shin, sounds like a ritual performed inside a wound. The title carries color, reflection, thirst, and distortion all at once. Kim’s Korean poetry is never content to let the body remain stable, and this collection seems to belong to that larger project of turning interior life inside out until it becomes landscape, theater, and nightmare. I would read the red mirror as a device for looking at what polite language refuses to face: blood, gendered violence, desire, mortality, appetite. Shin’s translation brings another English-language path into Kim’s world, distinct from the Don Mee Choi volumes but still part of the same necessary encounter. The book feels fierce, surreal, and bodily.
- Published
- 2019
- Publisher
- Action Books
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- South Korea
- ISBN
- 9780900575808