Notes from the Divided Country: Poems

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, bat...