Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye by BoSeon Shim and translated by YoungShil Ji

This is poetry from Korea, Republic of.

Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye by BoSeon Shim translated by YoungShil Ji is published by White Pine Press. This is a Book originally written in Korean. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.7819352109E12.

Someone Always in the Corner of My Eye, by Shim BoSeon and translated by YoungShil Ji, has a title full of peripheral anxiety. The figure is not directly seen, but also not absent. It remains in the corner, just enough to alter how the speaker moves through the world. In this Korean poetry collection, I would expect poems of surveillance, memory, desire, urban unease, or private haunting. The phrase also feels tender: someone is always there, maybe as companion, maybe as threat, maybe as the self one cannot quite face. Ji’s translation brings that ambiguity into English, where the title already does impressive work. This seems like a collection for readers interested in contemporary poems that make attention itself unstable, where what matters most may be what cannot be looked at directly.

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.