Lady No by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Jack Saebyok Jung

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Lady No by Kim Hyesoon translated by Jack Saebyok Jung is published by Ecco. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2026.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780063446687E12.

Lady No, by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Jack Saebyok Jung, sounds like a refusal given a body and a title. In Kim’s world, “no” is not merely negation. It can be a mask, a persona, a politics, a way of surviving systems that would prefer women to be legible and compliant. This Korean collection, arriving in English through Jung’s translation, belongs to Kim’s larger landscape of grotesque embodiment, feminist rage, and formally ungovernable lyric speech. I would read it as a book that asks what happens when refusal stops being reactive and becomes generative. What can “no” build? What can it protect? What can it destroy? For readers already drawn to Kim’s extremity, this feels like another essential encounter with her brilliant disobedience.

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.