The Hell of That Star

Singular poetry made through censorship, elusion, and language renewal_x000D_ _x000D_ The astonishing poetry collection The Hell of That Star enlivens the horror of Korean life under U.S.-backed authoritarianism. Poems of blows and vomit, births and coffins alternate blithe confidence and trembling terror. When slapped seven times by a government censor, Kim responded with defiant poems. The death of language becomes a death of the writer; within death, Kim finds new life in fragmentation and reorientation. This singular volume provides a wild and rigorous study of the words of the nation-state and the self, as well as the deprivations, detainments, and surprises in between. In evading censorship, Kim's poems question, twist, and transmute; language is a site where the personal and political meet to escape containment, emptiness, and domestication. The book includes an essay by the author, with an introduction and notes by the translator._x000D_ _x000D_ [sample poem]_x000D_ _x000D_ The tough after all_x000D_ we still remain_x000D_ and just in gathering it is lovingly_x000D_ even while building each other's tombs_x000D_ while patting each other's backs_x000D_ _x000D_ But when each bird turns around_x000D_ their arms flung! open_x000D_ embracing tightly what_x000D_ they do not even recognize as their grave_x000D_ and they hug and hold harder and harder_x000D_ stretching four limbs out over the laid sleeping mat and blanket_x000D_ saying I love you I love you even in their sleep_x000D_ In this world from which crying birds have disappeared_x000D_ only I am left

Table of Contents:
Introduction Foreword: Midsness by Cindy Juyoung Ok I. That Place 1 That Place 2 That Place 3 That Place 4 That Place 5 That Place 6 Democracy on the Edges of Dong-gu The Burning Country Frozen Over The American Store on Some Day in Some Month The Tears of the Dead Pupil Flight Owl The Ringing of That Day A Flower That Refuses to Be Poetry Salt Big Eyes The Boy Who Went Alone Visible Even with Eye Patches on Both Eyes The History of Food Map Through Absence More Than Presence Back to the Past II. Not Even Knowing He is Dead A Corpse Heavier Than the Whole World Oh Infectious Diseases I Have to Go to the Mountain In Front of the Round Wall Harvest Every Day I Rise like Clear Glass After All the Birds Have Gone Comic Ventriloquist Madame Sun Eating Van Gogh Eating Afterword: Voice Poetics by Kim Hyesoon Acknowledgements

About the Author :

KIM HYESOON has published fourteen Korean poetry collections and been translated into several languages. A winner of the Midang, Griffin, and Cikada poetry prizes, she lives in Seoul where she was a creative writing professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. CINDY JUYOUNG OK is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets (2024).

"Otherworldly imagery and anaphora create a kaleidoscope of eerie moments. Yet for all its images of death, the book glimmers with linguistic play and beautifully grotesque descriptions... Ok's skillful translation stands as a welcome addition to the growing list of Kim's memorable poetry available in English. This deserves a wide audience."--Publishers Weekly

"The Hell of That Star requires second reading--not just the poems individually, but the book as a whole. Kim's essay on the poet's ghostly voice and her editorial experience is crucial to a different appreciation of her work. The first impression might be upsetting, and the poems inexplicably grotesque, yet the bafflement crucially and effectively reflects the real confusion in the face of authoritarian violence. A second reading serves both as a relief and a revelation."--Jonathan Han, Asian Review of Books

"Cindy Juyoung Ok's new translation is at once precise and wild, a fruitful and ghostly conception of the poet and translator."--Iris Lee, Hopkins Review

"[Ok] stages an encounter between linguistic systems and the politics of attention. Kim's work has long challenged the boundaries of lyric expression. Ok meets that challenge with a poetics of responsible estrangement."--Issam Zineh, Asymptote

"[This] volume is a powerful addition to Hyesoon's work... these poems are existential terror deeply embodied."--Diana Arterian, co-translator of Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman in Hair on Fire, Center for the Art of Translation

"Every poetry that lives up to its true tongue is an ancient soul writing its author. Decades ago, Kim Hyesoon's ancient soul met Cindy Juyoung Ok's soul. The Hell of That Star is the reunion of two poet-ghosts."--Fady Joudah, author of [...]

"Out of charred books, the censor's black coal tar, "the whip of the word," in The Hell of That Star Kim Hyesoon enacts one woman's experience of and resistance to the neocolonial U.S.-sponsored dictatorship in postwar South Korea, with its relentless censorship, police brutality, economic exploitation, and martial law. Kim imagines a 'language without language, ' the placeless place of the 'midstness' of life and death, visceral, intestinal, with curse-words spat like seeds, pus seeping from eyes, a 'corpse heavier than the whole world', 'I--I--I--I--I.' Her fierce interrogations of empire and patriarchy, the grotesque violence and violations of a woman's life under an authoritarian regime, are embodied by an utterly original, unique voice--raw, sardonic, scatological, agonized, enacting the emotional extremity one finds in ancient tragedy. As Michael Scammell, commenting on Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don, observed: 'The greater the original, the more translations it can bear.' Kim Hyesoon is blessed to have as her collaborators in English brilliant poet-translators; Ok's translation is a work of true translatus, carrying-across Kim's ferocity and extremity into an English of commensurate intensity, inventiveness, and strangeness, restless in its questioning, transforming anguish and anger into expanding possibility."--Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes from the Divided Country and Notes from the North

"The English-language renditions snap and haze language through shatters of earth and body, in keeping with Kim's challenge; they resynthesize fallout from her words into alt-selves speaking some parts human, some parts bird."--Kristin Dykstra, translator of The Winter Garden Photograph

"What does it mean to speak from a place where 'the tongue is banished and exiled'? How do you make the experience of extremity real, to the reader who has not suffered it? It is hard to sum up the psychological, political, and spiritual ambitions of Kim Hyesoon's collection, but Cindy Juyoung Ok's muscular translation compels for the ways it transmits the urgencies of Kim's visions as well as protects the vulnerabilities in those exigencies."--Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing