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National Poetry Month: Don Mee Choi

About Blog Post Apr 2, 2024 by SCLSNJ Staff
National Poetry Month: Don Mee Choi   Created by Bob Helmbrecht, collection development librarian Our National Poetry Month poet for today is Don Mee Choi.  The Library has three of Choi's books in the collection, which together comprise the KOR-US trilogy. The first collection, “Hardly War,” was published in 2016. Kathleen Rooney, writing in “The New York Times Sunday Book Review” said of this collection, “Choi’s use of hybrid forms — poetry, memoir, opera libretto, images and artifacts from her father’s career as a photojournalist in the Korean and Vietnam Wars — lets her explore themes of injustice and empire, history and identity, sifting through the detritus of family, translation, propaganda and dislocation.” Choi's next collection, “DMZ Colony,” won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. The Judges Citation for the prize was as follows: “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.” The author's most recent collection, "Mirror Nation," is being released this week. From the publisher's description: "Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedes Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective." Check out a collection by Don Mee Choi today!
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