Hardly War - by Don Mee Choi (Paperback)

About the Book

Documents of war by Choi's father fuel her second collection of poetry, a passionate and personal defiance of nationalism.

Book Synopsis

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

Like fried potato chips - I believe so,
utterly so - The hush-hush proving
ground was utterly proven as history -
Hardly=History - I believe so, eerily so
- hush hush - Now watch this
performance - Bull's-eye - An uncanny
human understanding on target -
Absolute=History - loaded with
terrifying meaning - The Air Force
doesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration -

Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United States via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.

Review Quotes

Choi's use of hybrid forms poetry, memoir, opera libretto, images and artifacts from her father's -career as a photojournalist in the Korean and Vietnam Wars--lets her explore themes of injustice and empire, history and identity, sifting through the detritus of family, translation, propaganda and dislocation.
Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Playful and complex...Choi's poetry operates within a tradition of Korean-American experimental poets that includes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. Choi's zany take on militarism and the Korean diaspora may seem absurdist, but it is an inventive and daring waltz that upends what is commonly understood as the 'Forgotten War.'
Publishers Weekly

While imperial history relishes mythmaking and triumphalism at the expense of the human and psychological costs of war, Choi revels in history's untold spaces.
Lizzie Tribone, BOMB

This book's sort of rogue clarity hinges on the poet's relationship with her father. Essentially, we experience the destabilizing effects of US-ROK entanglement as coherent because this relationship sutures time and space. His award-winning photographs of the war suffuse the pages.
Caitie Moore, The Poetry Project Newsletter

About the Author

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War, The Morning News Is Exciting, and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a 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, which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.