Just Like - (Moon Country) by Lee Sumyeong (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics.

These poems build strikingly on the breakthroughs of Korean forebears like Yi Sang and Oh Kyu-won. They also establish Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation: her problematized "repetitions" chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton. Marked by a distinctive voice and approach, Just Like introduces a brilliant and singular contemporary Korean writer into English.

The poems of Lee Sumyeong's Just Like evince a striking tension between clarity and complexity. Purged of any heightened diction or preciously wrought syntax, Lee's writing can give the impression of being austere to the point of crystallinity. But it is the opposite-a teeming space where concrete objects become unstable and where simple propositions constantly buckle and fissure.

Review Quotes

"'Falling outside from within is a strange thing.// Blanks begin walking.' Falling within from outside is also a strange thing, maybe equally strange or maybe an entirely different strange thing, but it's a movement unleashed by these restless poems of everything and nothing on the move, 'unfurling you' and unfurling in you. In one poem, a 'person grown longer than the body' merges with a lawn from where it is 'speaking words as round as the earth.' This person 'is away from emotion, ' but in this poem, these poems, feeling doesn't recognize where a person ends and a thing begins. 'It is Tuesday and// am connected through table and chair and sofa and/ cushion on sofa.' It is Tuesday and am connected through table and chair and screen and words on screen. Words that begin me walking, first round the table, then out the door to the lawn where I'm falling outside. Nothing I have ever read has come closer to capturing the whirling of 'the clinging things rising things/ things all undone' that constitute selves in the world and vice versa. It is a gift to be able to experience this movement traversed into English." Ellen Dillon, author of Morsel May Sleep

About the Author

Lee Sumyeong was born in Seoul in 1965. She is the author of eight poetry collections in Korean as well as numerous critical writings and books on poetics. In addition, she has translated several texts into Korean, including books on Romanticism, Lacan, Derrida, and Joyce.

Colin Leemarshall lives in South Korea. He runs the print-on-demand press Erotoplasty Editions, which sells innovative and idiosyncratic books of poetry at cost price.