Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young and translated by Hedgie Choi

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young translated by Hedgie Choi is published by Black Ocean. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2021.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781939568397E12.

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.

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.