Autobiography of Death
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Kim Hyesoon’s poems “create a seething, imaginative under-and over-world where myth and politics, the everyday and the fabulous, bleed into each other” (Sean O’Brien, The Independent)
*Winner of The Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award*
The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with “Face of Rhythm,” a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Questions of the agency and effects of death, in both individual and mass tragedies, are central to this extraordinary collective elegy from Kim (All the Garbage of the World, Unite!). "The only thing you can give birth to yourself is, your death," Kim writes in the book's major component, a sequence of 49 poems one for each of the 49 days the dead wander before reincarnation. The dead here frequently attempt to go about their former lives in a moving juxtaposition of the mundane and the terrible: "Will I get to work on time? You head toward the life you won't be living." Kim's collective you moves in and out of particular circumstances, chronicling loss with surprisingly delicate observations, as when she writes, "Woman, you're dead/ Water your shadow and your grave blooms." A long poem, "Face of Rhythm," serves as the book's second part as well as a kind of coda, offering a meditation on the endurable limits of a life that works in counterpoint to the bardo of the earlier poems. This is Choi's sixth masterly translation of Kim, and it fully reveals the startling architecture Kim develops to display structural horrors, individual loss, and the links between them.
