Kim Hyesoon
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A Drink of Red Mirror
A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon’s surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, her works translated to Chinese, Swedish, English, French, German, Dutch, and beyond. In A Drink of Red Mirror, Kim Hyesoon raises a glass to the reader in the form of a series of riddles, poems conjuring the you inside the me, the night inside the day, the outside inside the inside, the ocean inside the tear. Kim’s radical, paradoxical intimacies entail sites of pain as well as wonder, opening onto impossible—which is to say, visionary—vistas. Again and again, in these poems as across her career, Kim unlocks a horizon inside the vanishing point. -Action Books
View playlistAction Books Fall 2017: Recent and Imminent
You can’t cut a cross-section of the Action Books catalog without getting covered in the radical, political, visionary, gorgeous, grotesque poetical blood that runs through our veins; you can’t map the international span of the Action Books roster without turning the globe in every direction. We are extremely proud of these impossibilities. This playlist is culled from some of our recently released books from here and afar, from the translated collections we’ve published in the past by groundbreaking Korean poets Kim Hyesoon and Kim Yideum, and from two of our upcoming releases, THIRD MILLENNIUM HEART by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen (Denmark) and ADRENALIN by Ghayath Almadoun (Syria).
View playlistThe Second Person
These are just a few poems that make clever, heartrending, enigmatic, and startling uses of the second person. I am fascinated by you--the second person pronoun--because of its capaciousness and changeability. There is the you that refers just to you, the singular you; but then there's the plural you, the group of you, the masses of all of you; there's the you you that is all of us or all of them at once; there's the you that is actually a part of me. I love second person address because it seems to lay bare the communicative thrust behind all acts of poetry. To invoke you in my poem calls attention to the fact that--whether you are out there and listening or not, whether you are specific or general, living or dead, human or nonhuman--you exist, I remember you, and I am trying to reach you.
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