DMZ Colony - Softcover

Choi, Don Mee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 194069695X ISBN 13: 9781940696959

Publisher: Wave Books, 2020

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

"Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."--Judges Citation

Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Orphan Cheo Geum-jeom
(Age 13)

New Years day! I was stuffed from eating too many rice cakes. My favorites are the ones with chestnuts in the middle. It was so cold that my fingers were ready to snap off, but I still went over to my friend's house to play. Then I heard a machine gun and saw a swarm of soldiers. They looked like ants against the snow. Come out! They shouted. We will kill you all! But my friend and I kept on playing. We pretended it was summer and made green noodles by rolling up camellia leaves and sliced them ever so thinly. Now all the village people were rounded up. My mom was crying, and I had never seen her cry before. Maybe that's why I started crying too. The soldiers made us go up the hill into the forest where my mom and I picked chestnuts. I was in such a panic that I didn't realize my shoes had come off. I cried even more. I hate being shoeless more than anything in the world. I held onto my mom's hand and turned around because the soldiers told us to. I looked down at the pit. I couldn't see anything but dirt. I thought to myself, How will I ever find my shoes again? Then suddenly my mom floated up in the air again and again. Somehow I was already lying beneath her. Somehow a bullet pierced through my left foot. Somehow it was so quiet that I could hear everything inside my head. Somehow I jumped up. All the corpses were burning. Somehow my mom was headless. My uncle, covered in blood, acted crazy. Somehow somehow. We ran across the creek and up the mountain. The soldiers saw us and started shooting again.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 194069695X
• ISBN 13: 9781940696959
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152