Under Flag

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"