Phantom Pain Wings
Kim Hyesoon author Don Mee Choi translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:And Other Stories
Published:12th Nov '24
Should be back in stock very soon
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)
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