I am a season that does not exist in the world by Kyung Ju Kim and translated by Jake Levine

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

I am a season that does not exist in the world by Kyung Ju Kim translated by Jake Levine is published by Black Ocean. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781939568144E12.

I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World, by Kim Kyung Ju and translated by Jake Levine, has one of those titles that feels like it already contains a complete poetics. The speaker is not outside time, exactly, but belongs to a climate reality has not made room for. Kim’s Korean poetry often moves with a restless, theatrical darkness, and this book sounds like a meditation on estrangement that refuses to become merely sad. I would read it as a weather system of selfhood: unstable, invented, impossible to forecast. Levine’s translation needs to carry both the lyric force and the strangeness of the premise. For readers drawn to poems of alienation, queer weather, urban dream, and psychological pressure, this book seems like a bright, cold door.

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.