Catcalling - by Soho Lee (Paperback)

About the Book

A blistering, expansive debut collection addressing sexual violence, #MeToo, and familial violence from one of the hottest new voices in Korean poetry.

Book Synopsis

Lee Soho's debut collection of poems is an experimental lyric bildungsroman that confronts dynamics of abuse as it challenges poetic form. Catcalling exposes and ridicules the violences that the speaker-protagonist Kyungjin encounters as she navigates a patriarchal world. Divided in to five formally distinct sections--ranging from lyric to prose poems to experimental mash-ups to concrete forms--the book begins in Kyungjin's childhood home as she recounts the haunting claustrophobia of verbal and psychological abuse, and follows her into the world as an emerging female poet navigating pervasive sexism in the era of Korea's own movement against sexual violence and the global #MeToo movement.

Lee's poetry is reactive: reacting to a series of foils, but also initiating a kind of chemical reaction that introduces something radically new to a world that has such confining gender and artistic expectations for a young poet. Following in the footsteps of feminist Korean poets like Kim Hyesoon, Kim Yideum, and Choi Seung-ja, who have made their way to English audiences in recent years, Lee Soho emphatically heralds the arrival of the next generation.

Review Quotes

"Catcalling by Lee Soho is a playful, ferocious uprising against patriarchal order, and Soje is a rising star-translator of South Korea's new wave of innovative feminist and queer poetry."--Don Mee Choi

"Adjectives like brilliant can't do this collection justice. It's the quick we try not to cut to; it's everything--it razes and reimagines everything--and Soje's translation seizes all the opportunities it offers."--Jennifer Croft, author of Homesick

"Teeming to a near burst, these experimental pieces are darkly funny, plucky, full of verve. Yes, we can trace the residue boldness evident in the voices of Kim Hyesoon, Kim Yideum, but what Lee has cast is singularly her own: we witness a sister slitting another sister's wrist, a poem blurs on the page because the speaker has been beaten with a frying pan--nowhere else would a mom hang from a daughter's crotch. I hung onto every sharp edge, every page, dumbstruck and rapt."--Diana Khoi Nguyen

"Lee Soho's Catcalling fascinates with poignant, strange poems. From the first sentence, "I was born but somehow you were born to," we are jarred awake by a voice that is as lucid as it is uncanny. Soje's brilliant translations bring to life Soho's poetry, a lens into a world that is at times twisted and witty, violent and tender. In this powerfully complex poetry collection, Lee demonstrates the astounding feat that it is to survive."--Eloisa Amezcua

"Catcalling creates a kaleidoscopic effect as it shifts through forms, its poems appearing sometimes as dialogues, sometimes as illustrations, and sometimes as a photograph of a pile of notes. . . . The result is a bold exploration of the role of the female artist and her place within a society. 'What cleans up your mess and gets tossed out like a rag?' writes Lee with acidic precision in the collection's penultimate poem. 'A woman.'"--Rhian Sasseen, Paris Review

"Catcalling feels so urgently intense, charged with a poetic boldness that is always unexpected and playful as well as darkly humorous."--Jay G Ying, Poetry Foundation

"Kyungjin wails as if to detonate the roof of patriarchy. The destructive power of her cackling is likewise formidable . . . Fiercely mocking herself, she tears off the clothes of falsehood and throws herself onto the sharp sword of irony."--Kim Haengsook

"I congratulate the poet--who tore herself apart, painfully displayed this scene of mutilation, and felt the ecstasy of exhibition--for receiving the prize that best suits her."--Jung Han-ah

"By penning testimonies and confessions from various speakers/victims/artists, Lee relentlessly strikes the nexus of violence, exposes its true nature, and criticizes its roots."--Cho Jae-ryong