Phantom Pain Wings
Kim Hyesoon
Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)
2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice
Kim Hyesoon is an iconic figure in feminist poetry. In her new collection, she depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an ‘I-do-bird-sequence’. Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.
‘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
Kim Hyesoon, born in 1955, is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She was the first woman poet to receive the prestigious Kim Su-yong and Midang awards. In Don Mee Choi’s translations, her Autobiography of Death (2018) was the winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and Phantom Pain Wingswon the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the first time a translated title has won the award. Her poetry has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish.