Winged ventriloquy – South Korea’s most innovative contemporary writer shapeshifts into a bird in a powerful, prize-winning collection

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)

Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.

‘Reads like a variety of horror – haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic. … In Kim’s metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power.’ New York Times, The Best Poetry of 2023