Book record
Poor Love Machine
Kim Hyesoon
Translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi
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.
- Published
- 2016
- Publisher
- Action Books
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- Korea, Republic of
- ISBN
- 9780900575754