Hardly War

‘Choi’s use of hybrid forms – poetry, memoir, opera libretto, images and artefacts from her father’s career as a photojournalist in the Korean and Vietnam Wars – lets her explore themes of injustice and empire, history and identity, sifting through the detritus of family, translation, propaganda, and dislocation.’ Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

‘The book moves into prose blocks, slowly thins into more lineated poems, and finally ends with an opera based on interviews she conducted with her father about his war experiences. Choi’s Hardly War thus defies genre. The book is part poetry, part memoir, and part documentary/collection of physical artefacts... a complex exploration of both the speaker as an individual subject and as a part of a much larger inheritance.’ Ansley Clark, The Volta Blog

‘Playful and complex... Choi's take on militarism and the Korean diaspora may seem absurdist, but it is an inventive and daring waltz that upends what is commonly understood as the “Forgotten War.”’ Publishers Weekly

‘While imperial history relishes mythmaking and triumphalism at the expense of the human and psychological costs of war, Choi revels in history’s untold spaces.’ Lizzie Tribone, BOMB

‘Hardly War is harrowing to read, a full-bodied immersion into a stream of jagged, unharmonized voices. But it also offers comfort in its sly indictment of war’s ideological tools, the language of nationalism, militarism, patriotism, and the binaries of the Cold War. Perhaps the swaying hydrangeas and the declassified flowers of Choi’s cosmos may linger in our minds, propagating more disobedient vocabulary for talking about war and imagining a future beyond its ravages.’ Sukjong Hong, The Margins

‘Hardly War is a category-defying, auto-ethnographic, strongly anticolonial book.’ Rich Smith, The Stranger

‘This book's sort of rogue clarity hinges on the poet's relationship with her father. Essentially, we experience the destabilising effects of US-ROK entanglement as coherent because this relationship sutures time and space. His award-winning photographs of the war suffuse the pages.’ Caitie Moore, The Poetry Project Newsletter

‘Constructed from poems, chunks of prose, sheet music, photographs, collage, and even the script for an (incredibly short) opera, Hardly War is unlike anything you’ve ever seen.’ Paul Constant, The Seattle Review of Books

‘Hardly War is refreshingly strange, a hybrid of poetry, prose and photography. Assembling musical notation, Korean ideograms, photographs and, in one memorable instance, a Smokey the Bear poster, Choi grapples with a war that has receded from American consciousness but whose consequences Koreans continue to feel.’ Alex Gallo-Brown, City Arts

‘This stunning book – this arrangement of recurring hydrangeas and chemical materials; of artillery rounds and detonating mechanisms; of rebellions against incendiary government-sponsored thinking – is a must-read. A truly difficult read, but a must!’ Paul Cunningham, Fanzine

‘These lines claim no authority beyond that of the poet herself, juxtaposing voices and sources to invite re-interpretation...Choi deconstructs and recomposes her materials, consistently resisting conventional narrative logic.’ Mary-Kim Arnold, Hyperallergic

‘Don Mee Choi details the interior of the life of a young girl in the middle of war. This is no mere reduction or retelling. The metaphor stands that we are all hardly adults. Perhaps hardly human…If Hardly War can teach us anything, it is that perspective is everything.’ Benjamin Champagne, New Pages

‘Choi calls attention to the murky cultural trance we live in. In writing it, she has committed an important act—one that disobeys history and severs ties to power: it shows us something different from what we think we know.’ Michelle Lewis, Drunken Boat

‘Choi’s Hardly War provides a strong method…appropriate to current engagements and thinking styles. Not without art, not without some kind of representation that ties the ideas together, can we handle and process our understanding, our statements of identity and healing…find the mindfulness and reflection by taking that which is personal and bringing the entire world inward… It’s a book of process as much as it is a book of witness.’ Greg Bem, Berfrois

‘Hardly War is a brilliant and layered collection that forces us to reexamine the codes of language and our conceptual notions of war. An act of protest in itself, Hardly War gives us a fresh and often complex perspective on a war that is often called the “forgotten war.”’ Michael Browne, Angel City Review