The dead draw the living toward new language in Jimin Seo’s extraordinary debut poetry collection, OSSIA. Writing across Korean and English in poems that span a breadth of forms, Seo renders an entirely original map of the voice in its shifting address to a range of ghostly figures: his mother; old lovers; his late friend and mentor, the legendary poet-translator Richard Howard. Taking the cleaving mechanism of translation as a point of departure (“ossia” means “or rather” and is used to indicate an alternative way of playing a passage in a musical score), Seo’s intricate, polyvocal poems are rich with grief and radiant with the vivid charisma of specific people, specific love. What regions does the lyric mode chart that the dispassionate account cannot? How do present conditions of longing shape perceptions of the past? OSSIA surfaces the unsayable terrain of history, holding us in the complex coordinates of eros and education, origin and loss.
JIMIN SEO was born in Seoul, and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. OSSIA is his first book. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, annulet, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. He lives in New York City.
PRAISE FOR OSSIA
“OSSIA is thrillingly alive. There’s an inventive daring at work in the lines that feels at times like a song, at times like the voice in your head, telling you about yourself and others, everything you do and don’t want to know. One part intimate self-regard, one part provocation, this lyric extension of a conversation between friends, between mentor and mentee, the living and the dead, lover and beloved, pursues a series of renewals as the poet offers the poems in Korean and English, hoping to include all of the registers of his feelings. The result is a gorgeous game of language and poetry, conducted for the highest stakes: love.”
–ALEXANDER CHEE, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
