Radio Days - by Ha Jaeyoun (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A collection of poems that gives new life and magic to the everyday.

Radio Days offers a unique collection by Ha Jaeyoun in a distinct, clear style, distinguishing it from her previous works in English. Although her poems range widely in topic, they are united by lucid language and breathtaking imagery. Through vivid impressions of humid childhood summers, Radio Days is an extended meditation on the heartbreak of growing up and being alive. Together, the poems create a whimsical, quietly unsettling, and nostalgic universe that is easily entered while refusing to make obvious statements on loss and love.

Review Quotes

"Lee Sumyeong's poems in Colin Leemarshall's fluidly odd translation find language forms for something like 'omnidirectional' ontological 'dislocation;' they 'shake the whereabouts, ' 'congealed with excitement.' Like the subject-objects and object-subjects that 'do cooperation unknown to us, ' these poems feel like a kind of weird exercise in living with/as "strange signs that cannot be learned'-- in reading them 'I seem to pass by having become an exercise I do not know.' But like most truly interesting art and the historical/perceptual materials from which it arises, just because you don't know and can't learn what's happening to you, doesn't mean it isn't happening to you."--Kirsten (Kai) Ihns

About the Author

Ha Jaeyoun was born in 1975 in South Korea, and she received her bachelor's and doctorate degrees in Korean literature from Koryo University. In addition to Radio Days, originally published in 2006, she has published two other poetry collections in Korean as well as many scholarly works on modern Korean poetry. She has previously been translated into English by Jake Levine in the collection Poems of Hwang Yuwon, Ha Jaeyoun, & Seo Dae-kyung.

Sue Hyon Bae was born in South Korea and received an MFA in poetry at Arizona State University. She is cotranslator of the poetry collection A Drink of Red Mirror by Kim Hyesoon and has published a collection of original poetry in English, Truce Country.