Autobiography of Death
Autobiography of Death
paperback
Published:
27 November, 2018
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Description
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9780811227346 |
| ISBN10 | 0811227340 |
| Number Of Pages | 128 |
| Item Weight | 168 g |
| Product Dimensions | 152 x 229 x 8 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
| Format | paperback |
Media Reviews
"Living through the military dictatorships and uprisings of South Korea’s post-war period, and writing from a present marked by continued corruption among society’s highest ranks, Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death addresses and gives voice to the swirling and incalculable mass of those whose lives were ended unjustly." -- Tyler Green - Kenyon Review
""By being 'of' and not 'about' death, Autobiography of Death recognizes both individual and collective involvement in the structure of death—unable to unstick itself from the structure of power." " -- Lotte L.S. - “I Refuse to Review”: Literary Criticism and Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death - Ploughshare
"Questions of the agency and effects of death, in both individual and mass tragedies, are central to this extraordinary collective elegy from Kim...This is Choi’s sixth masterly translation of Kim, and it fully reveals the startling architecture Kim develops to display structural horrors, individual loss, and the links between them." -- Autobiography of Death - Publishers Weekly (starred)
"In forty-nine poems, each representing a day, Kim captures death’s cycle between life and reincarnation: pages filled with wings and shadows, female laughter and weeping, bloody rabbits and dead mothers." -- Madeline Vardell - The Arkansas International
"In the grievous wake of the Sewol Ferry incident of 2014, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon composed a cycle of forty-nine poems—one for each day the dead must await reincarnation—to produce a harrowing work of shock, outrage, and veneration for the children lost to this disaster. Through Don Mee Choi's extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Hyesoon's art—a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism—yield 'a low note no one has ever sung before.' That otherworldly tone may sound like life itself, the poet sings, 'for even death can't enter this deep inside me.'" -- Griffin Prize Judges Citation - Griffin Prize Judges Citation
"Kim Hyesoon is Korea’s most important living poet and by far its most imaginative writer." -- Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature, University of British Columbia
"The birdlike Kim wove a pattern of poems, so strangely compelling and curious, and utterly unlike anything I had heard before." -- Sasha Dugdale
Author's Bio
Kim Hyesoon is the author of several books of poetry and essays. She has received many awards for her poetry, including the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize for Autobiography of Death and the prestigious Samsung Ho-Am Prize in 2022. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.