Description

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)

2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnes Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.

‘Reads like a variety of horror – haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic. … In Kim’s metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power.’ New York Times, The Best Poetry of 2023

Publisher Review

‘Reads like a variety of horror – haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic. … In Kim’s metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power.’ Elisa Gabbert, New York Times, The Best Poetry of 2023 ‘Phantom Pain Wings presents a stunningly original and audacious work in which grief and interventions with patriarchy and war trauma are embodied in a capacious and visceral ventriloquism that Kim Hyesoon calls an “I-do-bird sequence”: “Bird cuts me out / like the way sunlight cuts out shadows // Hole enters/ the spot where I was cut out/ I exit.”‘ National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry judging panel ‘There is no thematic break or stylistic rupture in Kim’s poetry, despite the length of her career. The kitchen remains bloody and agonistic, demanding the preparation of yet another family meal. Knives and carcasses and dark orifices exist in otherworldly spaces.’ E. Tammy Kim, The New Yorker ‘Death speaks across, and beyond, many languages. In Choi’s empathic translations, Hyesoon’s poetry takes flight into a resonant and deathless English.’ Srikanth Reddy, The Washington Post ‘Kim Hyesoon has been one of my favourite poets for a number of years. Her work, and the collection Phantom Pain Wings, demonstrates her ability to lean into and out of surreality to get at emotions experienced beyond everyday language.’ Wayne Holloway-Smith, The Poetry Society Books of The Year 2023 ‘Kim Hyesoon continues to make her mark as a major figure in contemporary poetry with the physicality with which she enters her metaphors, breaking down separations of mind and body and of art and politics.’ Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub ‘Every new book by Kim Hyesoon is a gift…these poems will remain inside me for a long time to come.’ Alexa Frank, Words Without Borders