Magnolia & Lotus: Selected Poems of Hyesim

“Reading poems from another language, culture, and century, I often feel like a foreigner excluded from the original’s greatest subtleties. Not so in Hyesim’s miraculous time-traveling poems, which might have been written yesterday or tomorrow, and anywhere. There’s not a single opaque word in the book. The poems are Buddhist, yes, and Zen (S?n) in particular, but they’re written for anyone interested in human consciousness: what it is, how it perceives the world, how it can be transformed,...