Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi is published by New Directions Publishing Corporation. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2018.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780811227346E12.

Autobiography of Death, by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi, is one of those titles that seems impossible and then becomes completely exact. Death, here, is not only an ending; it is a speaker, a method, a system of looking back at the living. Kim’s Korean poetry is famous for its bodily extremity and political imagination, but the force of this book is also its strange discipline. I would read it as a sequence of aftermaths, where grief refuses to become dignified and the dead do not stay politely elsewhere. Choi’s translation keeps the poems jagged, intimate, and unnerving. This is a book for readers who want poetry to make metaphysical pressure feel physical, almost anatomical, without surrendering its dark humor or lyric charge.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.