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.

Choi's hybrid structure allows her, in some sense, to have it both ways--to look at her subjects while simultaneously, and paradoxically, showing that some subjects are just too big to see in full: war, your parents' life before and without you, your government and its decisions.
--Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Playful and complex . . . Choi's poetry operates within a tradition of Korean-American experimental poets that includes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. Choi's zany take on militarism and the Korean diaspora may seem absurdist, but it is an inventive and daring waltz that upends what is commonly understood as the 'Forgotten War.'

--Publishers Weekly

Formally, Don Mee Choi is an inheritor of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose seminal Dictee (1982) has had a major impact on contemporary innovative American poetry. Yet Choi innovates on Cha's decades-old example. Choi's work releases new-media energy; it moves at fiber optic speed as it to struggles to find terms for our 21st century experience of globalized media, especially as such media affects our sense of history, commodity, violence, politics, terror, and freedom.
--Joyelle McSweeney, Montevidayo

Don Mee Choi writes about violence and injustice in modalities that are neither sentimental, obvious, or pornographic.
--Forrest Gander

Publisher: Wave Books

Pub date: 2020-04-07

Length: 152 pages