Mommy must be a fountain of feathers by Hye-sun Kim and translated by Don Mee Choi

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Mommy must be a fountain of feathers by Hye-sun Kim translated by Don Mee Choi is published by Action Books. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2008.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780979975516E12.

Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi, is a title that turns motherhood into something unstable, soft, absurd, and faintly monstrous. A fountain gives abundance and repetition; feathers suggest birds, fragility, flight, costume, shedding. In Kim’s Korean poetry, the maternal is rarely allowed to stay sentimental. It becomes grotesque, funny, violent, tender, and politically charged. Choi’s translation is crucial because the book’s force depends on tonal volatility: nursery language colliding with horror, domestic intimacy becoming surreal theater. I would read this collection as one of Kim’s necessary disturbances of the body and family. It is not a comforting book about motherhood, which is precisely why it may be true in ways comfort cannot manage.

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.