Must-Read Poetry: Spring 2023

April

Human Time: Selected Poems by Kim Haengsook, translated by Jake Levine

Haengsook is an essential South Korean poet, and this is the first selected volume of her work, which spans five books. She writes in both lineated and prose forms, and frequently engages with the work of fiction writers and , from  to , often employing a unique and jarring second-person narrative (“I haven’t lost the qualities that make me a bed. My little squeaking sounds are also part of me.”). As translator  notes, Haengsook writes in a style she calls “precise ambiguity,” a paradox that creates disarming, unique verses. “You can’t tell top from bottom,” she begins “Summoning the Soul.” “I threw you into the river. / I scattered you into the air.” Her haunting lines—“You don’t know the way to me / but come to me from anywhere”—are twice appended with an enjambment: “I love you.”, but Haengsook’s second person has the alchemical feel of invitation, as in “The Chorus”: “Stand in front of us,” she writes, “and sing like you could fly, sing like you could fall.”