Description
A Lesser Love is a book of love poems and elegies for those who have fumbled and stumbled and disappointed. These are poems of love and departure for romantic partners, family members, even countries and communities. Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh has descibred her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. This spirit of jeong permeates this book of poems that are astonishing in the connections they draw and the ties they bind.
In A Lesser Love readers will find poems composed of "Ingredients for Memories that Can Be Used as Explosives" and poems composed of chemistry equations that convert light into "reasonable dioxide" and then further transmogrify the formula into a complex understanding of the parent-child relationship. A book of intimate poems that invite readers into a private world, that geography grows wider and more interconnected with each passing page. Through the eyes of mothers, fathers, daughters, aunts, friends, and lovers, we see the tragedy of a sinking ferry, they hypocrisies of government agencies, the aftermath of war, and a very wide view through the Hubble space telescope.
With evocative lyricism and profound emotional intensity Koh has crafted a book of poems that charm and delight and profoundly enrich.
Product Details
| Publisher | LSU Press |
| Publish Date | October 16, 2017 |
| Pages | 80 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780807167779 |
| Dimensions | 8.8 X 5.9 X 0.3 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
Every new poem begins with a cooing excitement, a chance to make things right. Every birth is an opportunity to take revenge for what came before, and a chance to improve those who wronged us. Koh reminds us that the choice is ours to make, every single time.--The Seattle Review of Books
Koh's poems unite realities habit opposes: love, pain; the absent, the present; the present, the past; laughter, sorrow; harsh reality, foggy myth; the living, ghosts.... Koh, whose vision fuses American and Korean culture determinedly but nonchalantly, whose distinctive voice can startle as it soothes, and whose invention is a book that delights, disrupts, razes, edifies, and refuses ever to be just one thing. In other words, A Lesser Love is first-rate, intelligent, and pure gold--a triumph.--Timothy Donnelly, author of The Cloud Corporation
Love, war, and recovered testimony from Korea's unhealed border inform the formal and imaginative boundaries within E. J. Koh's panoptic poems. In A Lesser Love, Koh imagines the details of her own CIA file, revises the Pledge of Allegiance, and translates Beyoncé. With acuity and dexterity, this poet leaps into the dangers of the present.--D. A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys
Unshirking, Koh's verse is spare, evocative, and gut-moving, drawing out into interludes of clever reflections on cultural place.--World Literature Today
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