Don Mee Choi

This poetry collection is the predecessor to Choi's DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 NBA for Poetry.

The themes in the two books are similar--war, her father's work as a South Korean photojournalist in Korea and for Korea during the Vietnam War. And this one started off in a promising way, mocking news reports (American? Korean?) that considered the Korean War (and maybe the Vietnam War too?) as being "hardly war".

But I did not enjoy this one nearly as much. Again there is untranslated Korean which is only briefly explained in the notes, and there are puns using numbers--which are puns in Korean, not English. But there are a LOT of flowers mentioned here. Flowers edited into photos as leaders' faces. A mention that her father only photographs flowers now (is this true?).

There are no red hydrangeas, so what does a red hydrangea represent? Azaleas, daisies, crocuses, rose of Sharon (which is mentioned as being South Korea's national flower, I think?), fosythias, and more. I know what these flowers look like, but I really didn't understand what Choi was getting at. (Traditional meanings (in what tradition?)? Wordplay in Korean? Do all these flowers references make sense if you are Korean? Korean American? Well-read in poetry?

I think this one pretty much went over my head.… (mer)

National Book Award Poetry 2020 winner

I requested this book from my library because it was on the NBA Poetry longlist, and it ultimately won. It is certainly poetry, but it is also memoir, biography, photography, and experimental. It is a mish mash of the author's memories, interview, her father's memories and work, history, journalism, and imagination.

Over the last month I have accidentally been focusing on recent Korean/Korean-American/East Asian literature, by following author and audiobook narrators on Hoopla. I have listened to a variety of books focused on or including historical events in Korea WW2 to present: [book:The Last Story of Mina Lee|49374507], [book:If You Leave Me|34858106], [book:How We Disappeared|42550681], and [book:The Kinship of Secrets|37570619]. These books are all novels, and while reading them in such a short time allows me to build a stronger knowledge of Korean history I still question learning history from fiction. It was absolutely fascinating to find the presidents, countries, and events mentioned (with photos), in this book of poetry.… (mer)