Phantom Pain Wings

"Through Don Mee Choi’s extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Kim’s art—a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism—yield ‘a low note no one has ever sung before.’" -- Citation for the Griffin Poetry Prize for Autobiography of Death
"There is no thematic break or stylistic rupture in Kim’s poetry, despite the length of her career. The kitchen remains bloody and agonistic, demanding the preparation of yet another family meal. Knives and carcasses and dark orifices exist in otherworldly spaces." -- E. Tammy Kim - The New Yorker
"Kim Hyesoon’s poems create a seething, imaginative under- and over-world where myth and politics, the everyday and the fabulous, bleed into each other." -- Sean O'Brien - The Independent
"To portray the endless struggles against injustice, Kim combines her signature experimental language with elements inspired by Korea's folklore and legends, as well as cultural legacies from different parts of the world." -- Park Han-sol - Korea Times
"In these poems, the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting are depicted through what  the poet calls an “I-do—bird sequence,” where “Bird-human is the ‘I.’” A simultaneity of voices and identities rise and fall, circling and exiting by their delayed wings of pain." -- Alan Lau - The International Examiner
"Kim Hyesoon continues to make her mark as a major figure in contemporary poetry with the physicality with which she enters her metaphors, breaking down separations of mind and body and of art and politics." -- Rebecca Morgan Frank - LitHub
"My estimation of this author and translator continues to grow with this new collection that also grapples with death, memory, and trauma but is even more deeply personal… Like its predecessor, one of the best parts of this collection is watching Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi’s fiercely intelligent minds at work." -- Pierce Alquist - Book Riot
"Grief, translation, reclamation." -- Karla Strand - Ms.
"An iconic figure from South Korea, the feminist poet Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the furthest reaches of the lyric universe in this powerful new poetry collection channeling the language of birds." -- Poets.org
"Every new book by Kim Hyesoon is a gift...these poems will remain inside me for a long time to come." -- Alexa Frank - Words Without Borders
"Reads like a variety of horror—haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic. … In Kim’s metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power." -- Elisa Gabbert - New York Times
"Phantom Pain Wings presents a stunningly original and audacious work in which grief and interventions with patriarchy and war trauma are embodied in a capacious and visceral ventriloquism that Kim Hyesoon calls an ‘I-do-bird sequence’: ‘Bird cuts me out / like the way sunlight cuts out shadows