B-Dragon Suite - by Stine An (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

B-Dragon Suite is a hybrid poetry collection that remixes K-pop, experimental translation, sound art, and emoji poetics to explore Korean diasporic identity.

This debut book of poetry treats translation as play, performance, and embodied sound. Across seven interlinked sections, Stine An stages a fabulated K-pop universe, complete with boy band LIL BANG and girl group The Pink Blossoms, alongside lyric poems and prose meditations that code-switch between Korean and English. The book situates K-pop as both pleasure engine and cultural archive, asking how language survives colonial history, migration, and spectacle without resolving into easy consumption.

Review Quotes

"Stine An's B-Dragon Suite shines forth from the crossroads of a transcultural, multilingual imaginary that bridges K-pop and poetry with a fierce, singular, poetics. Rich with cross-cultural sonorities and perspectives, the poems espouse sharp collisions--or slippages--between the US and Korea, poetry and music, translation and multilingualism, grief and resistance. This book threads hard histories into the needle of the present day, rewiring them into a poetic coup d'etat. It's a maximalist, hyper-sensual, energizing treat, revealing the sinuousness of our globalized moment: some call it soft power, but the punches are very real."--Sawako Nakayasu

"Bridging South Korea and Korean America, Kafka and K-pop, Stine An's B-Dragon Suite is a revelatory libretto for the absurdist afterlives of modernity-coloniality. In this dazzling debut, An queers, camps, tickles, and remixes language into a series of shimmering anti-translations, transforming a journey through the underworld into candy-coated spectacles of visual poetry. Accompanied through this mirror world by Lil Bang, 'your favorite soft power ethno-nationalist global sensation *pop* boy band, ' we watch as 'bomb' bubbles into the balms and blossoms of bom (spring), as gutters fill with dreams of a lemon-flavored limitlessness. Underneath it all, a troubling question pulsates: 'But has anyone told you what it costs to make it back out of the underworld just to perform your role well enough to save others?' In conversation with a rich tradition of feminist Asian/American avant-garde poetic practice, B-Dragon Suite is both highly referential and wholly original; an intoxicating, brain-scratching joyride that is also deeply moving."--Franny Choi

Previous praise for Stine An's translations:

"High praise is also due for the tremendous dexterity of translator Stine An, who wraps her arms around the wild edges of Yoo's distinct poetic voice, like giving a hug to the rain while growing an umbrella."--Sawako Nakayasu, in praise of Today's Morning Vocabulary, translated by Stine An

"Translator and poet Stine An is the latest collaborator in Yoo's photographic process, allowing English-language readers to recognize both Yoo's absurd and humane ingenuity and his location along the lyric coordinates of Yi Sang, Frank O'Hara, Kim Hyesoon, Georg Trakl, Tomaz Salamun, and others. Today's Morning Vocabulary is an elixir, an invaluable tonic.--Joyelle McSweeney, in praise of Today's Morning Vocabulary, translated by Stine An

About the Author

Stine An is a poet, translator, and performer based in New York City. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown, and has received fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, Yaddo, ALTA, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her publications include Today's Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (2025), Winter Night Rabbit Worries by Yoo Heekyung (2026), S_MMER CR_SH (2025), and Comet & Star written by Lee Juck and illustrated by Lee Jinhee (2024). Her debut poetry collection, B-Dragon Suite, won the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize.