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Hardly War

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Recorded live in Los Angeles

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

Like fried potato chips – I believe so,
utterly so – The hush-hush proving
ground was utterly proven as history –
Hardly=History – I believe so, eerily so
– hush hush – Now watch this
performance – Bull's-eye – An uncanny
human understanding on target –
Absolute=History – loaded with
terrifying meaning – The Air Force
doesn't say, hence Ugly=Narration –

Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She was born in Seoul and came to the United States via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle, Washington.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 21, 2016
      The poetry of war is often laden with depictions of atrocity, but in her second collection, Choi (The Morning News Is Exciting) veers away from such material to offer a playful and complex Korean War song of flora, food, and fatherhood. In “trying to fold race into geopolitics and geopolitics into poetry,” Choi succeeds mightily. The book, divided into three sections—“Hardly War,” “Purely Illustrative,” and “Hardly Opera”—is a collage of reproduced photographs, musical scales, and formally innovative poems. She bases her work on historical research and intimate interviews with her father, a photographer during the Korean War who shot only flowers as he aged. Choi refuses to translate the history of the Republic of Korea as a readily accessible narrative. Additionally, her refusal to translate passages from Korean to English and her prominent use of the diminutive little set up explicit contrasts with Western literary traditions and the tragic nature of war. “I, Lack-a-daisy, born two miles from here,” she writes, “Here is DMZ.” Far from lackadaisical, Choi’s poetry operates within a tradition of Korean-American experimental poets that includes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim. Choi’s zany take on militarism and the Korean diaspora may seem absurdist, but it is an inventive and daring waltz that upends what is commonly understood as the “Forgotten War.”

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  • English

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