Notes from the Divided Country: Poems - Softcover

Suji Kwock Kim; Sue Kwock Kim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807128732 ISBN 13: 9780807128732

Publisher: LSU Press, 2003

Synopsis

In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts a number of difficult subjects―colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile.

In settings from New York to San Francisco, from Scotland to Seoul, her poems question “what threads hold / our lives together” in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man’s-land between every “you” and “I,” her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past and hope for the future. Drawing upon a wide range of voices, styles, and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.

About this title

About the Author

Suji Kwock Kim’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807128732
• ISBN 13: 9780807128732
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88