Recenzii
‘Reads like a variety of horror – haunted, grotesque, futureless. … 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
‘Phantom Pain Wings presents a stunningly original and audacious work in which grief and interventions with patriarchy and war trauma are embodied in a capacious and visceral ventriloquism’ National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry judging panel
‘There is no thematic break or stylistic rupture in Kim’s poetry, despite the length of her career. The kitchen remains bloody and agonistic, demanding the preparation of yet another family meal. Knives and carcasses and dark orifices exist in otherworldly spaces.’ E. Tammy Kim, The New Yorker
‘Death speaks across, and beyond, many languages. In Choi’s empathic translations, Hyesoon’s poetry takes flight into a resonant and deathless English.’ Srikanth Reddy, The Washington Post
‘Kim Hyesoon has been one of my favourite poets for a number of years. Her work, and the collection Phantom Pain Wings, demonstrates her ability to lean into and out of surreality to get at emotions experienced beyond everyday language.’ Wayne Holloway-Smith, The Poetry Society Books of The Year 2023
‘Kim Hyesoon continues to make her mark as a major figure in contemporary poetry with the physicality with which she enters her metaphors, breaking down separations of mind and body and of art and politics.’ Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub
‘Every new book by Kim Hyesoon is a gift...these poems will remain inside me for a long time to come.’ Alexa Frank, Words Without Borders
‘Phantom Pain Wings is exactly the sort of epic I want to read in these times. Every line is taut, with the poetic beak tugging between infinite and minuscule, aerial and visceral, death and life. Each fragmented image radically shifts perspective – the reader is made to manoeuvre, like a bird attempting to find a perch on a seemingly sheer surface. Grand, fragile, poignant, political, the bird poetry of Kim Hyesoon is the necessary work of our age.’ Sasha Dugdale
‘Kim Hyesoon has been one of my favourite poets for a number of years. Her work, and the collection Phantom Pain Wings, demonstrates her ability to lean into and out of surreality to get at emotions experienced beyond everyday language.’ Wayne Holloway-Smith, Book of the Year, The Poetry Society
‘Phantom Pain Wings depicts mouths filled with smoke, ash, ice, thumbtacks, silence. Is the poem an orifice, or a flock? This extreme question provides both central and peripheral delight, in ways that resemble a nervous system, but also a city. Of note: the beautiful, surprising and moving ‘Translator's Diary’ by Don Mee Choi.’ Bhanu Kapil
‘Kim Hyesoon sits at the well of poetry like the soothsayers of old who could see across worlds and time, into the minds of people and non-human beings, while celebrating the cosmic and the everyday in the same breath. Phantom Pain Wings confirms her as one of the world’s best contemporary poets. Surreal and wise, the genius of poetry lives in these poems.’ Sjón
‘To read Kim Hyesoon is to be taken up into language, thrown into the shuddery rhythmic space wherein the reading self must find and reinvent itself in negotiations of grief, violence, power and otherness. Through Don Mee Choi’s attentive and brilliant translations we emerge, knowing ourselves and the world in a new state of perception.’ Deryn Rees-Jones
