OSSIA

The dead draw the living toward new language in Jimin Seo’s extraordinary debut poetry collection, OSSIA. Writing across Korean and English in poems that span a breadth of forms, Seo renders an entirely original map of the voice in its shifting address to a range of ghostly figures: his mother; old lovers; his late friend and mentor, the legendary poet-translator Richard Howard. Taking the cleaving mechanism of translation as a point of departure (“ossia” means “or rather” and is used to indicate an alternative way of playing a passage in a musical score), Seo’s intricate, polyvocal poems are rich with grief and radiant with the vivid charisma of specific people, specific love. What regions does the lyric mode chart that the dispassionate account cannot? How do present conditions of longing shape perceptions of the past? OSSIA surfaces the unsayable terrain of history, holding us in the complex coordinates of eros and education, origin and loss. JIMIN SEO was born in Seoul, and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. OSSIA is his first book. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, annulet, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. He lives in New York City. “OSSIA is thrillingly alive. There’s an inventive daring at work in the lines that feels at times like a song, at times like the voice in your head, telling you about yourself and others, everything you do and don’t want to know. One part intimate self-regard, one part provocation, this lyric extension of a conversation between friends, between mentor and mentee, the living and the dead, lover and beloved, pursues a series of renewals as the poet offers the poems in Korean and English, hoping to include all of the registers ofhis feelings. The result is a gorgeous game of language and poetry, conducted for the highest stakes: love.”–ALEXANDER CHEE, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel“To enter OSSIA is to step inside a haunted house, a hall of mirrors, and an echo chamber all at once. At the outset, Jimin Seo’s speaker (disguised as himself, or himselfin disguise) offers traces of a family history marked by abandonment and loss, and one whose legacy includes a habit of retreating into one’s headspace so deeply that anything outside it, even one’s own body, seems strange, and too unpredictable to approach―except, of course, through language. In other words, he is made a poet. ‘I am a child of nothing,’ Seo writes, ‘that is to say / I am a child of books and the voice they sang / into my body.’“Fortunately, Seo comes to share a life-defining friendship with the legendary poet Richard Howard, a bond so magical that the late Howard’s voice is virtually resurrected in the book’s ongoing dramatic exchange. Parts of this back-and-forth appear also in Seo’s native Korean, which recurs throughout the book as if from the speaker’s alternate (ossia means ‘alternatively’) linguistic perspective. Uncanny, gorgeous, wise, exhilarating, and driven to represent the messy business of subject formation as accurately, but as exquisitely, as possible, OSSIA is an extraordinary achievement, and unlike anything I’ve read before.”–TIMOTHY DONNELLY, author of Chariot“Abounding with ghost and animal voices, Jimin Seo’s OSSIA makes a radiant and enchanting debut that musically oscillates between Korean and English. There is a mythological tone that permeates the collection, that tells and retells themes of death, birth, and rebirth mainly in the form of letters and incantatory address. One does not need Korean reading ability to fully relish in the linguistic prowess and hypnotic imagination of this collection. And yet, it is impressive how the bilingual presentations ofpoems invite stimulating questions of how and when images and figures are conjured and transformed amidst processes of revision/re-vision―adding to our meditation on the book’s themes while positioning the act of translation as a rich, creative, and spiritual act of communication. I am eager to witness this book to cast its luscious spell on both Korean and English–speaking literary communities.” –EMILY JUNGMIN YOON, author of Find Me as the Creature I Am