Don Mee Choi: *Freely Frayed* . With Rebecca Kosick

Join us to celebrate the UK publication of Korean-American poet and translator Don Mee Choi's work, in particular her newest collection *Freely Frayed* (And Other Stories). This is a rare and exciting chance to hear prominent voice in US poetics 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 author will be in conversation with poet and scholar Dr. Rebacca Kosick.

*Freely Frayed* gathers early poems, recent essays and translation notes grappling with the politics of distance and language in exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity, illustrating memory’s enactment of translation and a notion of salvage that creates a dialogue between forms. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place and language, and in turn to ask what history is built from this record.

As well as new collection *Freely Frayed*, the discussion will draw in Choi's poetic trilogy *DMZ Colony*, *Hardly War* and *Mirror Nation*, her translation of Kim Hyesoon's *Phantom Pain Wings* and *Autobiography of Death*. All are published for the first time in Britain by And Other Stories.

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:

Don Mee Choi is a highly innovative poet and a translator. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Her book *DMZ Colony* won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry while her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s *Phantom Pain Wings* won the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and scholar living in Bristol. She is the author of *Labor Day* (2020) and editor/translator of *Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics* (2023). She has just published *Dispatches from the Avant-Garage: The Alternative Press*.