EBB is honoured to celebrate the UK publication of Korean-American poet and translator Don Mee Choi's work. Choi will read from her poetic trilogy *DMZ Colony*, *Hardly War* and *Mirror Nation*, and from her translation of Kim Hyesoon's *Phantom Pain Wings*. All are published for the first time in Britain by one of our favourite small presses, And Other Stories.

This is a rare and exciting chance to hear Don Mee Choi read in person. Her thought and practice of both are among the most vital, political and experimental examples of poetry and translation at the borders of anglophone radical poetics and the (neo)colonial nation-state. The discussion will also cover Choi's translations of Kim Hyesoon and her essential short essay *Translation is a Mode / Translation is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode* (Ugly Duckling Presse).

Choi’s KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War and the subsequent DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation) brings us a new poetic language to learn. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship.

These books splice the personal and political to dizzying effect in a poetry fluid with forms and genres including reportage, memoir, opera libretto, archival photos and drawings. Using artefacts from Choi’s father, a professional documentary photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she explores her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

On *DMZ Colony*

"Here that awareness is embodied in disjointed and dreamlike dialogue and the coming together of both languages in one fractured twin-self. The result is a book for our age, a radical (in that it builds from the roots out) philosophy, a new angel of history backing away slowly from the wreck of the century.' Sasha Dugdale, PN Review

On *Phantom Pain Wings*:

Kim Hyesoon is an iconic figure in feminist poetry. In her new collection, she depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an ‘I-do-bird-sequence’. Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.

Bios:

Born in Seoul, South Korea, poet and translator Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (2010), Petite Manifesto (2014), Hardly War (2016), and DMZ Colony (2020), which won the National Book Award. She has translated many poems from Korean to English, including Kim Hyesoon’s books Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), a finalist for a PEN Poetry in Translation Award; and I’m OK, I’m Pig! (2014). Choi’s translations and poetry have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Trout, the Ampersand Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere.

Choi is a winner of the Whiting Award and of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. She is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Choi lives in Seattle.

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