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
Reflexions: Reading in the present tense, Ingrid de Kok and Mark Heywood continue to invite established and younger writers and other creative artists to reflect on a text that moved them, intellectually engaged them, frightened them or made them laugh. Our reviewer today is Finuala Dowling who reviews Migration, New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin.
In 2020, everything I read or reread took on the tint of the pandemic. In Somerset Maugham’s
Rain, I saw the explosive impact of quarantine; in David Malouf’s
An Imaginary Life I paused to underline Ovid’s reverie about “the randomness with which the disease advanced, how it appeared in one house, striking down all but a single child… then leapt two houses to claim another victim”. I saw my own lockdown-induced remoteness reflected in the types of seclusion featured in Claire Keegan’s
Author s Note: This essay was originally presented as a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution. Many thanks to Atom Atkinson and the organizers of the Chautauqua Literary Arts Program.
In the weeks in the run-up to Easter, my nana, Pastora Mendoza, teases for breakfast the raw egg from the pinhole she’s carefully punctured in order to keep the eggshell whole and unbroken. After she has washed and dried it, she’ll save the shell safely back in its carton. With four or five dozen collected, she’ll color the shells dipping them in dyes, ladling and cradling the empty eggs with a tablespoon. After she paints them, bright pastels for the season, she fills them with paper-punched confetti and seals the eggs again with colored tape and crepe paper.
Born out of war: The second great tide of twentieth century Gaelic poetry thenational.scot - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thenational.scot Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Emerging Scholars, Redux: Author â John Barton
May 12, 2021
For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems,
Polari, Seminal: The Anthology of Canadaâs Gay-Male Poets,
We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos, and
The Essential Douglas LePan, which won a 2020 eLit Award. In 2020, he published
Lost Family: A Memoir (a book of sonnets) with Signal Editions and edited
The Essential Derk Wynand for The Porcupineâs Quill. He lives in Victoria, BC, where he is the cityâs first queer poet laureate.
His poem âWhat We Live Forâ can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/what-we-live-for/.