Biologicity

An acclaimed poets poet with deadpan wit and a gift for lyric innovation reveals an entirely new side of Korean contemporary poetry. This debut English-language collection by Shin Hae-uk offers up poems that rebel against the thin boundaries between self and others, human and object, speaker and addressee. These poems inhabit the voices of houses, colors, planets, childhood friends; they know the manic spunk of a good day and the dizzy lethargy of a bad memory. In this kaleidoscopic collection, Shin breaks open for todays young poets the possibilities of time, tense, and speaker. Critics in her home country praise her as a prophet of the post-human, asking what is it like to exist and feelas a dead animal, as a sound, as someone elses memory. But for all its philosophical intelligence, Shins poetry is also funny, friendly, and sometimes even snarky, full of jagged left turns and mood changes. Shin knows what its like to feel you can be three different people within three minutes. These quirky, clever poems are for everyone who has ever shared that feeling.