January 26, 2021
In this week’s episode, Cathy Park Hong and Lynn Xu talk about the startling directness of Korean poet Choi Seungja and the humbling experience of translation. The conversation ranges from Nietzsche to South Korea in the 1980s, and from Paul Celan to capitalism. As Xu says, Choi’s poems contemplate “living with death as one’s companion,” but instead of indulging in nihilism, her poems are often surprisingly hopeful. Choi Seungja is one of the most influential feminist poets in South Korea, and her book
Phone Bells Keep Ringing For Me (Action Books) has recently been published in English, thanks to Cathy Park Hong and her cotranslator Won-Chung Kim.
Our contributors, from across our quarterly print issues and our website, read as widely and wildly as they write. Here, they tell us about the books that moved them most in this strange year.Â
Itâs a privilege, of course, to spend time thinking and writing about some of my favorite books that were published during this most absurd and solitaryâmost mendacious, violent, Americanâof years, but Iâm grateful to the following artists, among others, for sustaining my spirit. Iâve come to realize how important, even more crucial than usual, short forms have been for me in a time defined by so much precarity. The idea of reading a story or a poem, simply that, has felt attainable, and the act has reliably provided me with nourishment. Danielle Evansâs second book of stories,