Search results for ""Author Jake Levine""

First English-language collection from a leading poet in South Korea.Kim Haengsook is one South Korea’s most eminent contemporary poets, but a complete collection of her poems has never appeared in English before now. This selection draws on her work across her career and five books in Korean. Haengsook's poetic spaces are shrouded in a magic fog that is clarifying instead of obscuring. Built out of a language that incorporates a strategy of what she calls "precise ambiguity," her work radiates outward like great waves whose philosophical rhythm you can't help but get caught in.

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A debut English-language collection of hopeful and carefully attentive poems by one of South Korea’s most lauded young poets.This collection offers a selection of poems from Sin Yong Mok’s earlier collections, intended to serve as an illustration of his evolution as a poet, alongside a complete translation of the poems from his fourth collection, When Someone Called Someone, I Looked Back. Beautifully translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé with close attention to the sonorous aspects of Sin’s lines, this collection also captures the larger themes within Sin’s work and his attention to the spirit of community and peaceful coexistence with others. These are poems with a powerful belief in humanity and the beauty of the smallest hopes.

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Translated from the Korean by Jake Levine. Kim Kyung Ju's poetry operates in a world where no one seems to belong: "the living are born in the dead people's world, and the dead are born in the living." Already in its thirtieth edition in Korea, I AM A SEASON THAT DOES NOT EXIST IN THE WORLD is one of the most important books in the movement Korean critics have called Miraepa or future movement. Destructive forces like social isolation, disease, and ecological degradation are transformed into gateways to the sublime where human action takes on the mythic and chaotic quality of nature. Conflating human agency with the natural order, Kim's poems have been called by critics both a blessing and a curse to Korean literature. This book will be a startling English-language debut for one of the best-known poets writing in Korean today.

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In Beautiful and Useless, Kim Min Jeong exposes the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance. She uses slang, puns, cultural referents, and ‘naughty, unwomanly” language in order to challenge readers to expand their ideas of not only what a poem is, but also how women should speak. In this way Kim undermines patriarchal authority by displaying the absurd nature of gender expectations. But even larger than issues of gender, these poems reveal the illogical systems of power behind the apparent structures that govern the logic of everyday life. By making the source of these antagonisms and gender transgressions visible, they make them less powerful. This skillful translation from Soeun Seo and Jake Levine, brings the full playfulness and intelligence of Kim’s lyricism to English-language readers.

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