Book record
Mommy Must Be a Mountain of Feathers
Kim Hyesoon
Translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi
Mommy Must Be a Mountain of Feathers, by Kim Hyesoon, is a poetry collection from South Korea, translated by Don Mee Choi, published by Action Books. It is a Korean collection by Kim Hyesoon where maternal image, grotesque imagination, and bodily transformation refuse every polite boundary. Kim's title already contains the impossible tenderness and absurdity of her work: mother as mountain, body as feathers, care as something monstrous and weightless at once. I would read this first for the pressure of image and cadence rather than as a puzzle waiting for its correct answer. The useful description for a book like this should give the reader a door, not a lecture: enough context to orient the shelf, then enough mystery to let the poems keep their own weather. For this library, the book matters as more than a representative entry from South Korea. It shows how poetry in translation can carry local speech, private intensity, and literary history into English without becoming merely informational.
- Publisher
- Action Books
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- South Korea