Poor Love Machine by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Poor Love Machine by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi is published by Action Books. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780900575754E12.

Poor Love Machine, by Kim Hyesoon and translated by Don Mee Choi, is another of Kim’s great impossible titles: pathetic and mechanical, tender and industrial, funny and devastating. Love here is not pure feeling. It is a machine, and a poor one at that, glitching, producing, failing, repeating. Kim’s Korean poetry has a genius for exposing the body as a political and absurd apparatus, and Choi’s translation keeps that apparatus noisy. I would read this collection as a set of broken operations: desire manufactured under pressure, gender performing itself badly, lyric speech trying to escape the factory of the self. It is probably not a book that wants to soothe anyone. It wants to make the systems visible, then cover them in strange flowers, garbage, blood, and song.

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.