Catcalling

Lee Soho’s debut collection of poems is an experimental lyric bildungsroman that confronts dynamics of abuse as it challenges poetic form. Catcalling exposes and ridicules the violences that the speaker-protagonist Kyungjin encounters as she navigates a patriarchal world. Divided in to five formally distinct sections―ranging from lyric to prose poems to experimental mash-ups to concrete forms―the book begins in Kyungjin’s childhood home as she recounts the haunting claustrophobia of verbal and psychological abuse, and follows her into the world as an emerging female poet navigating pervasive sexism in the era of Korea’s own movement against sexual violence and the global #MeToo movement.

Lee’s poetry is reactive: reacting to a series of foils, but also initiating a kind of chemical reaction that introduces something radically new to a world that has such confining gender and artistic expectations for a young poet. Following in the footsteps of feminist Korean poets like Kim Hyesoon, Kim Yideum, and Choi Seung-ja, who have made their way to English audiences in recent years, Lee Soho emphatically heralds the arrival of the next generation.

Lee Soho (b. 1988) studied creative writing at the Seoul Arts University and earned an MA in Korean literature from Dongguk University. She made her debut winning the Newcomer Award in Modern Poetry in 2014. Her first collection, Catcalling, won the Kim Su-young Literary Award in 2018, the highest poetry honor in Korea. The judges deemed it, out of 237, “the only entry that demonstrates the intense energy of why the poem had to be written.” Her next book is forthcoming from Moonji.

Soje is the translator of Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla (Tilted Axis Press, 2020), Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, 2021), and Lee Soho’s Catcalling (Open Letter Books, 2021). They also make chogwa, a quarterly e-zine featuring one Korean poem and multiple English translations. Find excerpts, essays, and more at smokingtigers.com/so-j-lee.