Beautiful and Useless by Min Jeong Kim and translated by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Beautiful and Useless by Min Jeong Kim translated by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo is published by Black Ocean. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2020.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781939568366E12.

Beautiful and Useless, by Min Jeong Kim and translated by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo from Korean, brings Korean-language poetry connected to Korea, Republic of into English through Korean contemporary wit, useless beauty, and the friction between ornament and survival. The metadata gives the reader a doorway, but the real value is what happens once the poem starts making its own weather. I would read it for beauty, failure, glitter, and the odd usefulness of what refuses to become practical, not as a fixed lesson about Korea, Republic of. The best entry point is still the poem itself: the line that catches, the image that refuses to explain itself, the feeling that arrives before paraphrase. Beautiful and Useless belongs in the translated poetry library because it brings contemporary Korean poetry into the library with humor, damage, and sharp lyric intelligence.

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.