Phantom Pain Wings

Kim Hyesoon has won major acclaim in Korea and internationally and, in Don Mee Choi’s English translation, has won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the first time a translated title has won the award. Kim’s poetry has been translated into many languages. Don Mee Choi is a translator and highly innovative poet. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Incorporating archives, photographs and fragments of memory, Choi’s poetry explores historical events and the human impact of war. Her books include DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

‘Reads like a variety of horror – haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic. … In Kim’s metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power.’ Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, The Best Poetry of 2023