Author(s): Kim Hyesoon; Don Mee Choi (Translator)

Poetry

In Kim Hyesoon's radical new collection, Phantom Pain Wings, the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting are depicted through what the poet calls an "I-do-bird-sequence," where "Bird-human is the 'I.'" In the essay "Bird Rider" included in this edition, Kim says, "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out of birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I've never been." What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy that explores the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in "the eternal void of grief" (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine) Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and crashed words that fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnes Varda, a cremation ceremony, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, and so on. A simultaneity of voices and identities rise and fall, circling and exiting by their delayed wings of pain.