Myung Mi Kim's Commons weighs on the most sensitive of scales the minute grains of daily life in both peace and war, registering as very few works of literature have done our common burden of being subject to history. Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history.Kim's blank spaces are loaded silences: openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind does: an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure.Commons's fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.

Commons (New California Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

Kim, Myung Mi

Poetry

University of California Press

Poetry. "One is shaken by this severe and quiet telling... Myung Mi Kim's languange is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge"--Kathleen Fraser. In UNDER FLAG, winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." ("Body As One As History"). The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, "a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized.""'Beset by borders conquered, disfigured...' One is shaken by this severe and quiet telling. Not since Oppen, has the eroding presence of war on the wholeness of human existence been so vividly located. But the construction of perspective has shifted from male to female, occupier to occupied. Myung Mi Kim's languange is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge." Kathleen Fraser"

Under Flag

Kelsey Street Pr

Poetry. In UNDER FLAG, winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized. "Myung Mi Kim's languange is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge"-Kathleen Fraser. Third Printing.

Kelsey Street Press

The politics and poetics of language, culture and self all collide in Myung Mi Kim s Dura, a contemporary classic of Asian American and experimental literature, brought back into print by Nightboat Books on the tenth anniversary of its orginal publication. This edition features a preface by Juliana Spahr and an afterword by Stephen Hong Sohn.

Dura

History & Criticism

Nightboat Books

Poets and critics address the potential of language to address the increasing level of discord and precarity in the twenty-first century.At a time when wars, acts of terrorism, and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism, misogyny, and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse, language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity, and they negotiate ways to understand poetics, or the role of the poetic, in relation to language, the body politic, the human body, breath, the bodies of the natural environment, and the body of form.Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry also functions as a cry to protest late capitalist imperialism, misogyny, racism, climate change, and all the debilitating conditions of everyday life. Hubs of concern merge and diverge; precarity takes differently gendered, historied, embodied, geopolitical manifestations. The contributors articulate a poetics that renders what has not yet been crystallized as discourse into fields of force. They also acknowledge the beauties of sound, poetry, and music, and celebrate the power of community, marking the surge of energy that can occur at a particular place at a particular moment. Ultimately, Poetics and Precarity fosters further conversations that will imagine the concerns of poetics as a continuously emerging field.

Poetics and Precarity (Robert Creeley Lectures)

State University of New York Press

poetry, Korean immigrant woman at century's end

Dura (New American Poetry)

Sun & Moon Press

In Civil Bound, Myung Mi Kim turns a keen ear to language as the mechanism by which society operates. The poems engage multiple methods to make sense of this pervasive tool, its powers, nuances, and influences over the structure of our civilizations. Through investigations of ecology, capitalism, military powers, colonialization, and supremacy, the book uncovers patterns in the ways that language is active in perpetuating inequality and binding its subjects to the will of those in positions of authority. In questioning systems of oppression, the poems also offer the hope of forging new paths through the connecting power of language. Examining our participation in social contracts, communal goals, and human desires, Kim’s poems encourage us to salvage language as a means of connection that binds us in respect and commitment to our fellow human beings.

Civil Bound

Omnidawn

Breaking communication into its most discrete components, this collection of poems deeply examines forced loss, violence, and impoverishment. Exposing hidden relations in sound and sense, the language in this anthology communicates more than just ideas by testifying to the oppressive concepts and cultural practices that are dominant in today’s society. While the title of this expressive compilation means poverty, its content articulates the need for change.

Penury

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kim, Myung Mi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kim, Myung Mi

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kim, Myung Mi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Commons (New California Poetry)

Under Flag

Under Flag

Dura

Poetics and Precarity (Robert Creeley Lectures)

Dura (New American Poetry)

Civil Bound

Penury