DMZ Colony (National Book Award Winner)

by Don Mee Choi

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Choi’s work gives us pause to think that more poets should do the work of historians. In clarity of words, we understand what happened “before” and how it affects “now.” We are even more privileged to have Choi double as a memoirist, as well. Personal, political and poetic — a perfect trio, making DMZ Colony a touching book of poetry.

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

"Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."—Judges Citation

Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781940696959
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Read an Excerpt

What I remember about my childhood are the children, no older than me, who used to come around late afternoons begging for leftovers, even food that had gone sour. The drills at school in preparation for attacks by North Korea kept me anxious at night. I feared separation from my family due to the ever-pending war. I feared what my mother feared—my brother being swept up in protests and getting arrested and tortured. Our radio was turned off at night in case we were suspected of being North Korean sympathizers. At school, former North Korean spies came to give talks on the evil leader of North Korea. I stood at bus stops to see if I could spot any North Korean spies, but all I could spot were American GIs. My friends and I waved to them and called them Hellos. In our little courtyard, I skipped rope and played house with my paper dolls amongst big glazed jars of fermented veggies and spicy, pungent pastes. I feared the shadows they cast along the path to the outhouse. Stories of abandoned infant girls always piqued my interest, so I imagined that the abandoned babies might be inside the jars. Whenever I obeyed the shadows, I saw tiny floating arms covered in mold. And whenever it snowed, I made tiny snowmen on top of the covers of the jars. Like rats, children can be happy in darkness. But the biggest darkness of all was the midnight curfew. I didn't know the curfew was a curfew till my family escaped from it in 1972 and landed in Hong Kong. That's how big the darkness was

Table of Contents

Sky Translation

Wings of Return
-Ahn Hak-sŏp #1
-Ahn Hak-sŏp #2
-Ahn Hak-sŏp #3
-Ahn Hak-sŏp #4
-Ahn Hak-sŏp #5

Planetary Translation

The Orphans
-Orphan Cheo Geum-jeom
-Orphan Heo Jeom-dal
-Orphan Kim Kyong-nam
-Orphan Kim Kap-sun
-Orphan Cheong Cheong-ja
-Orphan Wu Gi-myo
-Orphan Yi Jeong-seon
-Orphan Kim Seong-rye
-Orphan Nine
-Who am I?

The Apparatus

Interpellation of Return

Mirror Words
-Ruoy Ycnellecxe
-Who are you?
-Your Excellency
-Era uoy evila?
-Sky Similes for Snow Geese
-(Blue x 300!)

(Neo) (=) (Angels)

Notes

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

Choi's hybrid structure allows her, in some sense, to have it both ways—to look at her subjects while simultaneously, and paradoxically, showing that some subjects are just too big to see in full: war, your parents' life before and without you, your government and its decisions.
—Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Playful and complex . . . Choi's poetry operates within a tradition of Korean-American experimental poets that includes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. Choi's zany take on militarism and the Korean diaspora may seem absurdist, but it is an inventive and daring waltz that upends what is commonly understood as the 'Forgotten War.'

—Publishers Weekly

Formally, Don Mee Choi is an inheritor of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose seminal Dictee (1982) has had a major impact on contemporary innovative American poetry. Yet Choi innovates on Cha's decades-old example. Choi's work releases new-media energy; it moves at fiber optic speed as it to struggles to find terms for our 21st century experience of globalized media, especially as such media affects our sense of history, commodity, violence, politics, terror, and freedom.
—Joyelle McSweeney, Montevidayo

Don Mee Choi writes about violence and injustice in modalities that are neither sentimental, obvious, or pornographic.
—Forrest Gander

From the Publisher