Birthstones in the Province of Mercy - by Bo Hee Moon (Paperback)

About the Book

"A collection of poems that confront the complex emotions that accompany understanding identity and belonging after transnational, cross-cultural adoption"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, a tender, yearning collection of poems that pieces together identity with the different shapes absence can take.

"Blurry eyes mean a longing for home," writes Bo Hee Moon in her prize-winning collection, "but we're unsure what home means." A South Korean adoptee raised in the United States, the poet reaches for language to confront the complex, myriad emotions that accompany understanding identity and belonging after transnational, cross-cultural adoption.

Through verse both innocent and wise, the speaker searches for the memory of a birth mother who passed before they could reunite, aided only by "my birth chart" and "this tiny, / careful body you gave me." To reimagine reunion, she creates a reality in which she can look into the "fragile depth" of her birth mother's eyes, envision her parents meeting among spring azaleas and rice paddies, and gently cleanse her mother's dying body. Transcending boundaries between generations, between life and death, she learns how to transform, how to forge an identity of her own, declaring, "I am changing, completely, / behind a rice paper door."

With poems that serve as our speaker's "loyal companion // in the burnt / pine and dawn," Birthstones in the Province of Mercy illuminates the language that nourishes the delicate and vital connection between an adoptee and her origins.

Review Quotes

"Bo Hee Moon's Birthstones in the Province of Mercy salvages a language for the unheard and unseen experiences of Korean American adoptees, whom neither America nor Korea have ever envisioned to be as vital, dynamic, and wide-ranging across poetics, literature, and advocacy around the globe. Moon exhumes a sense of mothering across the threshold of life, revealing our human lineage, perpetually renewed and destroyed by our own hands. In the bloody fight for belonging, Moon confronts linguistic, geographical, and cultural borders. With these poems, Moon joins the long and rich tradition of Korean and Korean American women's poetry."--E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators

"Bo Hee Moon's new book is a treasure. In it, we have the privilege of experiencing the objects of memory and history--place, food, plants, objects--gently presented by a dreamy consciousness that elaborates, questions, remembers. Each poem is a whole world, magically conjured from the American vernacular, often enriched by Korean hangul. This is the hopeful, sad, elegiac, and important work of an original poet of great talent and truth."--Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams

"Some people's families are conjured by biology. Some seek the families they need. But what if the fact and myth from which we first fashion a self leaves us carrying the weight of a hole, the wound left when one is manufactured to fill another's emptiness? Bo Hee Moon's Birthstones in the Province of Mercy is a beautiful, harrowing, resolutely honest, and moving examination of this question. Precise, eloquent, vividly lyric, this collection is spun from grief and a self-preservational steel. This is poetry with a tensile strength of mind and heart at its core that I admire deeply. It's a book for anyone who's had to will themselves free."--Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither Honeycomb

"Initiation is rebirth in Bo Hee Moon's sober and searching Birthstones in the Province of Mercy. Akin to a ceremony whose participant makes like prey and so 'outwits / the predator by seeing / the pattern, ' these offerings cast a spell with an image of the poet's birth mother, not only for safekeeping and kindness, but uniquely for dissipating the captivity of substitute descent and relearning the languages of self-sovereignty."--Roberto Tejada, author of Why the Assembly Disbanded

"In Birthstones in the Province of Mercy, Bo Hee Moon has created a brilliant extended meditation on adoption, South Korean heritage, and a constantly shifting identity over many years, vast distances, and deep imagination. At the center of the poet's yearning for connection is always the power of language to link her to the past, to create, and to alter her understanding of the vagaries of family and the elusiveness of belonging. Imagining the death of her birth mother, she writes, 'Actually, / are you returning // to earth as white butterflies / to say goodbye? I search // for you everyplace, but I only / have my birth chart // to go off of and this tiny, / careful body you gave me.' This is a profoundly moving, deeply felt collection of poems, one I will return to with great pleasure."--Kevin Prufer, author of The Fears

"Birthstones in the Province of Mercy is a revelation, truly. Moon's language is singular and suffused with ancestral lyric intensity made new, related to Korea, adoption, violence, reclamation. Sometimes tender, sometimes searing, she writes, 'Having energy / is the effect / of my sovereignty.' The spirit here is strong and haunting. One of the finest books of poems I have read in years."--Lee Herrick, author of In Praise of Late Wonder

"In poems that excavate the complexities and heartache of transnational, cross-cultural adoption, Bo Hee Moon has created a profound work of yearning and mystery. I love these poems for their clarity of vision and lyrical poignancy. And I love this book for how the individual poems build upon each other and intensify one another, and how, through it all, they reach toward a powerful type of human connection."--Matthew Olzmann, Jake Adam York Prize Judge

About the Author

A South Korean adoptee, Bo Hee Moon is the author of one previous book of poems, Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, which she published under another name with Tinderbox Editions in 2021. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, swamp pink, The Margins, and other journals. She is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she has received the Inprint Brown Foundation Fellowship. Moon currently lives in Houston, and you can find her at boheemoon.com.