Description
Book SynopsisKim Hyesoon’s poems “create a seething, imaginative under-and over-world where myth and politics, the everyday and the fabulous, bleed into each other” (Sean O’Brien,
The Independent)
Trade Review"Living through the military dictatorships and uprisings of South Korea’s post-war period, and writing from a present marked by continued corruption among society’s highest ranks, Kim Hyesoon’s
Autobiography of Death addresses and gives voice to the swirling and incalculable mass of those whose lives were ended unjustly." -- Tyler Green - Kenyon Review
""By being 'of' and not 'about' death,
Autobiography of Death recognizes both individual and collective involvement in the structure of death—unable to unstick itself from the structure of power." " -- Lotte L.S. - Ploughshare
"Questions of the agency and effects of death, in both individual and mass tragedies, are central to this extraordinary collective elegy from Kim...This is Choi’s sixth masterly translation of Kim, and it fully reveals the startling architecture Kim develops to display structural horrors, individual loss, and the links between them." -- Publishers Weekly (starred)
"In forty-nine poems, each representing a day, Kim captures death’s cycle between life and reincarnation: pages filled with wings and shadows, female laughter and weeping, bloody rabbits and dead mothers." -- Madeline Vardell - The Arkansas International
"In the grievous wake of the Sewol Ferry incident of 2014, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon composed a cycle of forty-nine poems—one for each day the dead must await reincarnation—to produce a harrowing work of shock, outrage, and veneration for the children lost to this disaster. Through Don Mee Choi's extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Hyesoon's art—a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism—yield 'a low note no one has ever sung before.' That otherworldly tone may sound like life itself, the poet sings, 'for even death can't enter this deep inside me.'" -- Griffin Prize Judges Citation
"Kim Hyesoon is Korea’s most important living poet and by far its most imaginative writer." -- Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature, University of British Columbia
"The birdlike Kim wove a pattern of poems, so strangely compelling and curious, and utterly unlike anything I had heard before." -- Sasha Dugdale
