Under Flag

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 language is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge"-Kathleen Fraser.