Phantom Pain Wings

Kim Hyesoon author Don Mee Choi translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:And Other Stories

Publishing:12th Nov '24

£14.99

This title is due to be published on 12th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Phantom Pain Wings cover

Winged ventriloquy – South Korea’s most innovative contemporary writer shapeshifts into a bird in a powerful, prize-winning collection

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)

Winter 2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.

‘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.’ New York Times, The Best Poetry of 2023

‘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, The Best Poetry of 2023


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

ISBN: 9781916751200

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown