Description
A brilliant poet … Yes, this is North Korea, but also the world where a poet’s mind offers us a realm of imagination, where ‘the not-I in the I’ opens onto ‘silence [that] is never silent in this country.’ – Ilya Kaminsky, judge for the Lucille Medwick Award, Poetry Society of America
Polyvocality and the visual are both used brilliantly in service of rewriting the master narratives with which they are concerned. Lexically, referentially, conceptually, and with a painful and telling irony, these poems make a feast of a famine. – Evie Shockley, judge for the George Bogin Award, Poetry Society of America
These poems are part-nightmare, part-history book written in ammonia and blood. I couldn’t forget these lyrics of murder and escape, brutal musicality and prophecy. – Aimee Nezhukumatathil, judge for the George Bogin Award, Poetry Society of America
Another marvelous achievement is its rough music, syllable by syllable, magically contribut[ing] to a euphony which would have been cacophonous in the hands of a lesser poet. And that’s all before we absorb the subject matter – an account of love whose subject is fragile and potentially vulnerable to horrific loss. – Patrick Cotter, judge for the Gregory O’Donoghue Award (Munster Literature Centre, Ireland)
Suji Kwock Kim is author of Notes from the Divided Country, which won the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers/ Northern California Book Award, and was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize; and Private Property, a multimedia play performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the New Statesman, Poetry Review, Poetry London, London Magazine, and The North in the U.K., Irish Examiner, The Well Review, and Southword in Ireland, and Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times,  Washington Post, Slate, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, and Paris Review in the U.S.  She is a 2022 Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust.
