Hardly War
Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.
Like fried potato chips - I believe so,
utterly so - The hush-hush proving
ground was utterly proven as history -
Hardly=History - I believe so, eerily so
- hush hush - Now watch this
performance - Bull's-eye - An uncanny
human understanding on target -
Absolute=History - loaded with
terrifying meaning - The Air Force
doesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration -
Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United States via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.
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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 While imperial history relishes mythmaking and triumphalism at the expense of the human and psychological costs of war, Choi revels in history's untold spaces.
Lizzie Tribone, BOMB This book's sort of rogue clarity hinges on the poet's relationship with her father. Essentially, we experience the destabilizing effects of US-ROK entanglement as coherent because this relationship sutures time and space. His award-winning photographs of the war suffuse the pages.
Caitie Moore, The Poetry Project Newsletter
