Notes from the Divided Country: Poems

by Suji Kwock Kim

Book Overview

In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts a number of difficult subjects--colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, and love. She considers what a homeland would be for a divided nation and a divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen, or exile.

In settings from New York to San Francisco, from Scotland to Seoul, her poems question "what threads...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807128732
• ISBN13: 9780807128732
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A knock-out

I was blown away by this book. It isn't easy reading poems about wishing not to have been born, so I don't know how the hell she wrote them. She doesn't pull punches. She isn't afraid to tell unpleasant, sometimes terrifying, truths about one person's perspective on what it means to be human: "Admit it. You hate the body/ because it can be broken,/ stabbed, shot full of holes." "We didn't want to be born we didn't want." "I think of the loneliness of the dying,/ the bodies I saw along the way, rotting separately." "Last thoughts, last dreams crawling through his skull like worms." You don't hear writing like that every day. It fuses intelligence and emotion at the highest level. More importantly, she isn't afraid of strong feeling. The passion in many of her poems is astonishing. Maudlin, schmaudlin. That's the risk you take, if you don't want to write safe, skillful, emotionally bland, cerebral, forgettable work. The risk pays off here. A few poems in the 4th section falter a bit for me, but the rest of the book flies.

A brilliant debut

The previous review is clearly motivated by that pettiest and basest of emotions: professional envy. Who else would be obsessed by an author's awards and achievements, let alone use the term "Yaddo-ite" -- except a resentful fellow-author? None of that matters. What matters is that NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY is a beautiful, utterly heartfelt, utterly heartbreaking book. The self-accusation, the guilt at surviving, and the ambivalent, conflicted love that Miss Kim feels for her family is painfully apparent in every line of her poetry. There is nothing easy about it, no "exploitation of cultural heritage." Most importantly: as a Korean living and working in Seoul, it's extremely offensive to be told by some Westerner in the United States -- who obviously doesn't live in Korea, or know the first thing about Korean literary culture -- what constitutes "faux" and "authentic" Koreanness. We're perfectly capable of deciding on our own, thank you. Readers in Korea know that there have already been features on Miss Kim in two of the three major national newspapers. (I conducted one of the interviews.) Another colleague of mine is translating one of her poems for a Korean literary journal. Frankly, none of us would take the trouble of doing this if we didn't absolutely love her work. If an author's biographical facts must be mentioned in a review, let them be accurate ones: a childhood of immigrant poverty, not privilege; a younger brother and sister who were born mentally retarded and physically handicapped, thanks to poor medical treatment; a father who is a war orphan. But it's the writing that is first and foremost. I especially recommend "The Tree of Knowledge," "Borderlands," "The Chasm," "Fragments of the Forgotten War," "Monologue for an Onion" and "On Sparrows." In "Montage with Neon, Bok Choi, Gasoline, Lovers & Strangers," about walking around Seoul during Buddha's Birthday, the poem's ambivalence, moral complexity, and precarious balance between empathy with and distance from others, are remarkable:if anything's here at allit was builtout of ash, out of the skull-rubble of war,the city rising brick by brick like a shared dream,every bridge & pylon & girder & spar a miracle,when half a century agothere was nothingbut shrapnel, broken mortar-casings, corpses, the War Memorial in Itaewon counting MORE THAN 3 MILLION DEAD, OR MISSING --still missed by the living, still loved beyond reason, monument to the fact that no one can hurt you, no one kill youlike your own people.I'll never understand it.I wonder about others I see on the sidewalks, each soul fathomless --- strikers & scabs walking through Kwanghwamoon . . .riot-police rapping nightsticks against plexiglass-shields . . .hawkers haggling over cellphones or silk shirts . . .fishermen cleaning tubs of cuttlefish & squid . . .the grocer who calls me "daughter" because I look like her . . .bus-drivers hurtling past in a blast o

BRAVA

I'm an editor who has followed this poet's work in literary journals for almost 10 years, and I'm struck by how easily she could have published two books by now. Notice how many poems originally appeared in top-rank magazines like The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, etc. She isn't a kid. She's put in her dues. She must have thrown away a slew of published poems, working hard and writing new pieces, taking a long time to put this first book together. I can't emphasize enough how admirable and rare this is in the literary world. It reflects a drive for aesthetic purity that deserves the highest respect. I'm also struck by how unpredictable she's been over the years, from poem to poem. I never knew what she was going to send in next, and I still don't know. This is not to say that the book is without flaws; to my mind, they lie in the occasional, misguided attempts at formal, syntactic and tonal experimentation in the last section (Levitations, RICE, etc). But her vices are inseparable from the virtues I just mentioned: her staggering range, her variousness, the way in which she challenges herself constantly as a writer, and hence, her seemingly unlimited poetic potential, are exemplary.

RAVE, RAVE, RAVE

I saw a review of NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY in the Sunday L. A. Times a week ago, and went out & bought it at the L. A. Festival of Books. I loved it! I just bought another 2 copies as gifts for Mother's Day.I don't normally read poetry, so I'm not very articulate when it comes to technical terms, etc. But let me just say that this book is wonderful, and I loved it.I'm going to borrow some of the reviewer's words:"I wish I had space in which to consider at length the important debut of "Notes From the Divided Country" by Suji Kwock Kim. It seems to me that this first book (already acknowledged by the 2002 Walt Whitman Award) deserves close and celebratory attention.Suji Kwock Kim has written a book of unforgettable poems; she has found a way, through the medium of language, to allow readers into a double consciousness that is, finally, the poet's undivided mind. She writes of the "old country" reborn in the New World, of her ancestors in Korea during the Japanese occupation and her immediate family in America: the Trees of Unknowing and Knowledge. She writes of her mother's death with lamentative, bitter restraint. In one of the most inspired and brilliant poems, she considers sparrows and their symbology: "How to stay faithful / to earth, how to keep from betraying / its music " she wonders - and brings us full circle here - as she, too writes of the Earth that both divides us and brings us together." (LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW, April 27, 2003)