In this extraordinary, passionate debut poetry collection, Jimin Seo takes up a material we think we recognize – language – and transforms it through permutation, history, and translation into a lyrical and alien terrain. Seo takes up both Korean and English, drawing them across multiple experiences of relation – none of them equivalence. Translation and re-translation triangulate to form the ghostly third other which defines every relationship of two. Fragmentation, riff, homophony, and analogy sprawl like cuttings from a plant, yielding poems that grow in defiant new directions. This is a book calling to a mother, a teacher, lovers, and ultimately a self whose elements materialise through language, even as the speaker laments what language cannot be or hold.

Prizes

Winner of Changes Book Prize 2023 (United States)

Each part ripples with nimble musicality that spills over into an etymological linguistic ruckus while overtly addressing major themes throughout the book.

The promise of poetry lacquered by its fiscal hollowness, OSSIA wills itself towards an unlikely optimism, playful and funny, not something I would describe as hope.

Each poem operates like an individual measure that builds and responds to another, in different variations and across multiple languages, to create strange, intelligent music about art-making and loss.

Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He is the author of OSSIA, winner of The Changes Book Prize. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, annulet, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina's Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.