KIM HYESOON has published fourteen Korean poetry collections and been translated into several languages. A winner of the Midang, Griffin, and Cikada poetry prizes, she lives in Seoul where she was a creative writing professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. CINDY JUYOUNG OK is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets (2024).

"Otherworldly imagery and anaphora create a kaleidoscope of eerie moments. Yet for all its images of death, the book glimmers with linguistic play and beautifully grotesque descriptions... Ok's skillful translation stands as a welcome addition to the growing list of Kim's memorable poetry available in English. This deserves a wide audience."--Publishers Weekly

"The Hell of That Star requires second reading--not just the poems individually, but the book as a whole. Kim's essay on the poet's ghostly voice and her editorial experience is crucial to a different appreciation of her work. The first impression might be upsetting, and the poems inexplicably grotesque, yet the bafflement crucially and effectively reflects the real confusion in the face of authoritarian violence. A second reading serves both as a relief and a revelation."--Jonathan Han, Asian Review of Books

"Cindy Juyoung Ok's new translation is at once precise and wild, a fruitful and ghostly conception of the poet and translator."--Iris Lee, Hopkins Review

"Every poetry that lives up to its true tongue is an ancient soul writing its author. Decades ago, Kim Hyesoon's ancient soul met Cindy Juyoung Ok's soul. The Hell of That Star is the reunion of two poet-ghosts."--Fady Joudah, author of [...]

"Out of charred books, the censor's black coal tar, "the whip of the word," in The Hell of That Star Kim Hyesoon enacts one woman's experience of and resistance to the neocolonial U.S.-sponsored dictatorship in postwar South Korea, with its relentless censorship, police brutality, economic exploitation, and martial law. Kim imagines a 'language without language, ' the placeless place of the 'midstness' of life and death, visceral, intestinal, with curse-words spat like seeds, pus seeping from eyes, a 'corpse heavier than the whole world', 'I--I--I--I--I.' Her fierce interrogations of empire and patriarchy, the grotesque violence and violations of a woman's life under an authoritarian regime, are embodied by an utterly original, unique voice--raw, sardonic, scatological, agonized, enacting the emotional extremity one finds in ancient tragedy. As Michael Scammell, commenting on Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don, observed: 'The greater the original, the more translations it can bear.' Kim Hyesoon is blessed to have as her collaborators in English brilliant poet-translators; Ok's translation is a work of true translatus, carrying-across Kim's ferocity and extremity into an English of commensurate intensity, inventiveness, and strangeness, restless in its questioning, transforming anguish and anger into expanding possibility."--Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes from the Divided Country and Notes from the North

"The English-language renditions snap and haze language through shatters of earth and body, in keeping with Kim's challenge; they resynthesize fallout from her words into alt-selves speaking some parts human, some parts bird."--Kristin Dykstra, translator of The Winter Garden Photograph

"What does it mean to speak from a place where 'the tongue is banished and exiled'? How do you make the experience of extremity real, to the reader who has not suffered it? It is hard to sum up the psychological, political, and spiritual ambitions of Kim Hyesoon's collection, but Cindy Juyoung Ok's muscular translation compels for the ways it transmits the urgencies of Kim's visions as well as protects the vulnerabilities in those exigencies."--Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Pub date: 2026-02-03

Length: 108 pages