by Don Mee Choi
A bricolage of poetry, prose, real and imagined translations, photographs, memories, and hand-drawn overlapping circles, Don Mee Choi’s excavation of the lasting legacy of decades of war and occupation on the Korean peninsula is shot through with birds. I write of the land mass rather than the countries’ political designations because the line that differentiates the experiences of the people of North and South Korea is often muddy in Choi’s
DMZ Colony (Wave Books). While she is walking in Missouri, a migration of snow geese passing overhead sets off the author’s vertigo and triggers her return to Seoul. We learn the circumstances which caused her family to have to flee to have to, as her mother says, live “like birds” and we read about people who could not escape, those who “had no place to land.” Choi’s 2020 National Book Award winning
New Books by NER Authors
It’s been a busy publication month for
NER authors! Emily Pittinos, published in
NER40.1, released her debut book of poems, The Last Unkillable Thing (University of Iowa Press), a compilation of tender reflections both elegiac and ecological rooted in the domestic and natural worlds.
Essayist, poet, and pie lady Kate Lebo recently published
The Book of Difficult Fruit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of twenty-six lyrical essays (with recipes) centered on fruit, giving “insights into relationships, self-care, land stewardship, medical and botanical history, and so much more.” Her essays have appeared in
Jehanne Dubrow’s