Notes from the Divided Country: Poems - Hardcover

Suji Kwock Kim; Sue Kwock Kim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807128724 ISBN 13: 9780807128725

Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 2003

Synopsis

Offers poems of family, history, love, and vision.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"This is a brilliant, unerasable book. It begins with the descent of the soul into flesh, which is also the descent into the catastrophic, tormenting history of family and nation. Kim does not turn away from this history but takes it into herself, making poems that give it indelible voice. The poems as a whole surprise not only by their ambition and ferocity but by their delicacy, their sudden reserves of stillness and contemplation. If there is justice, the future will look back on this book as a major event." --- FRANK BIDART

"Powerful . . . These eloquent poems address the reader with an unswerving mix of music and vivid pain. These are poems of desolation and absence, political in the largest sense and private in the truest. . . .They mark the emergence of an exciting new voice." --- EAVAN BOLAND

"I am deeply moved and instructed by Suji Kwock Kim's brilliant debut collection, which moves fluently between the living and the dead, the Korean past and the Asian American present. NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY is a heartfelt, blood-soaked work of flights and explorations, of personal probings and historical exposures, of suffering and responsibility, of tribute and witness, of American soul-making." --- EDWARD HIRSCH

"NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY is a beautiful book of which an entire people, we undivided Americans, can be deeply proud. Kim's brilliantly crafted, brave new poems move us into an emotional union with the seemingly far-flung past of Korea's political geography that resulted, in just a short generation's time, in the making of over five hundred thousand new Americans. What voice, what witness, what glorious descendancy." --- GARRETT HONGO

"NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY springs out of a civil war in the soul. . . .[Its] revelation of horror is so explicit, so necessary; a facing up to history that frees the speaker. . . .[She] seem[s] to know that only an approximation of the truth can make [her] whole again, that even in the negative there's nobility. To understand the gift of the senses is a blessing. It is a graceful, powerful trope. . . .There's love and sadness at the root of these poems. There is also a bridge, a language that mends." --- YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, from his judge's citation

About the Author

Suji Kwock Kim's poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, and other journals and anthologies. She divides her time between San Francisco and New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0807128724
• ISBN 13: 9780807128725
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80