“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
