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Cold Candies

Lee Young-ju author Jae Kim translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Black Ocean

Published:20th Jan '22

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Cold Candies cover

Digital galley outreach to both trade and specialty outlets Special outreach to Korean & Asian literary centers and instructors Extensive review mailing to book media, critics, and influencers Events and interviews with author & translator

Cold Candies encapsulate the saccharine strangeness of a woman’s life. Fragments of narratives about girls, dolls, sisters, mothers, men, lizards, the moon, and pillows are brought together into otherworldly images that are devastating, yet familiar. Lee Young-ju is one of South Korea’s most original minds, and this collection, curated and translated by National Endowment of Arts Fellow Jae Kim, features a selection from her extraordinary body of work. These prose poems are often self-portraits, and together, they are as much an account of her life as it is an attempt to understand it. Pulling out threads from her past, she examines its traumas and tragedies and unravels a haunting dreamscape of intimacy and kinship.

"Cold Candies is a dense collection of prose poems, and its imagery and thematic concerns navigate dark terrain. Accidents await and ghosts wander. Things burn and melt, or flood and rot. It is easy to feel as if you’ve stepped into a Dalí painting, with impossible, melting landscapes. Or a Picasso, with mutable faces and bodies. While Lee Young-Ju’s Cold Candies gathers the broken and unsettled, the collection somehow manages to avoid all despondency, through its intense mental questing and through its insistence, seen in the final sentence of the collection, that we come 'walking out of our thoughts to be loved.'" –Lisa Higgs, Colorado Review

ISBN: 9781939568403

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

96 pages