Book record
Pillar of Books
Moon Bo Young
Translated from Korean by Hedgie Choi
Pillar of Books, by Moon Bo Young and translated by Hedgie Choi, is a Korean poetry collection whose title gives reading a bodily architecture. Books are not just objects on a shelf. They become a pillar, something that holds weight, blocks passage, marks a ruin, or props up the self. Moon’s contemporary work, in Choi’s translation, seems likely to move with a young, alert, fragmentary intelligence. I would read this book as a meditation on how language accumulates around a life until it becomes structure and burden at once. The title makes me think of the reader surrounded by texts, maybe steadied by them, maybe trapped. This is the kind of poetry that may appeal to anyone interested in books not as escape from life, but as one of life’s stranger load-bearing forms.
- Published
- 2021
- Publisher
- Black Ocean
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- Korea, Republic of
- ISBN
- 9781939568397