This collection brings together three of the most exciting voices in contemporary Korean poetry to the English language in translation. These three women poets shock and delight, entertain and de-familiarize, corrupt and contaminate traditional readings and stereotypical definitions of Asian women, Asian poetry, Asian-ness. while k-pop girl groups sell cuteness, marketing the female body as an object to be consumed by the male gaze, poems by these three women reveal how that manufactured cuteness is a state of acute deformity. If the male gaze strips the female body of significant social agency through a loss of authenticity or aura, these poets give us a world that shuts down the power behind that gaze.
This tenth volume in the Asia Pacific Series presents three essential women’s voices in contemporary world literature with a selection of work from Kim Min-Jeong, Kim Yi-Deum & Kim Haeng Sook, and gives English-language readers new access to the hybridity of genre and style representative of Korea’s (“Future wave”) poets.
