Radio Days

“Lee Sumyeong’s poems in Colin Leemarshall’s fluidly odd translation find language forms for something like ‘omnidirectional’ ontological ‘dislocation;’ they ‘shake the whereabouts,’ ‘congealed with excitement.’ Like the subject-objects and object-subjects that ‘do cooperation unknown to us,’ these poems feel like a kind of weird exercise in living with/as “strange signs that cannot be learned’— in reading them ‘I seem to pass by having become an exercise I do not know.’ But like most truly interesting art and the historical/perceptual materials from which it arises, just because you don’t know and can’t learn what's happening to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to you."—Kirsten (Kai) Ihns