Book record
Whale and Vapor
Kim Kyung Ju
Translated from Korean by Jake Levine
Whale and Vapor, by Kim Kyung Ju and translated by Jake Levine, gives us two forms that barely belong in the same sentence: massive animal body and disappearing air. That contrast feels central to the book’s possible power. Kim’s Korean poetry often moves through theatrical darkness and creaturely transformation, and here the title suggests scale, vanishing, oceanic force, and instability. A whale is ancient, heavy, almost mythic. Vapor is brief, diffuse, impossible to hold. I would read this collection as a study in bodies that refuse one stable state. Levine’s translation has to manage both the weight and the evaporation. For readers drawn to poems of metamorphosis, dream logic, and animal atmosphere, this sounds like one of those books where the title already begins changing the room.
- Published
- 2020
- Publisher
- Black Ocean Press
- Language
- Korean
- Country
- South Korea
- ISBN
- 9781939568304