Notes from the Divided Country: Poems - Paperback

by Suji Kwock Kim (Author)

In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts a number of difficult subjects--colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile.

In settings from New York to San Francisco, from Scotland to Seoul, her poems question "what threads hold / our lives together" in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man's-land between every "you" and "I," her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past and hope for the future. Drawing upon a wide range of voices, styles, and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.

Author Biography

Suji Kwock Kim's poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and on National Public Radio.