Biologicity

An acclaimed ＂poet’s 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 today’s 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 feel--as a dead animal, as a sound, as someone else’s memory. But for all its philosophical intelligence, Shin’s poetry is also funny, friendly, and sometimes even snarky, full of jagged left turns and mood changes. Shin knows what it’s 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.

Shin Hae-uk is the author of three poetry books in Korean in addition to essay collections and a novel. She won Korea’s Author’s Choice Emerging Poet Award in 2010 and received the Kim Hyun Literary Prize in 2022. She holds a doctorate in Korean literature from Korea University and currently teaches creative writing at Dongduk Women’s University in Seoul.

Spencer Lee-Lenfield’s translations from Korean to English have appeared in publications including Guernica, New England Review, Colorado Review, Asymptote, and The Dial. Lee-Lenfield is currently a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at Yale University as well as an assistant editor at The Yale Review. Lee-Lenfield’s writing has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, Poetics Today, The New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Magazine, and Slate.