Awards

• 'Mirror Nation offers the best of what poetry can provide—a new way of seeing.'

Overview

‘Mirror Nation offers the best of what poetry can provide—a new way of seeing.’ Firecracker Awards, Don Mee Choi delves into South Korea’s violent recent history, particularly the military’s massacre of hundreds of students taking part in the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, in a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a ‘magnetic field of memory’. ‘Don Mee Choi draws on friendships, literature and documentary materials to elucidate the personal griefs we suffer under the assaults of empire. Formally explosive and emotionally harrowing, Mirror Nation is a riveting investigation into the coded images that fuse memories of different times and places.’ Forrest Gander, Poetry Society Book of the Year 2024 ‘From Ethiopia to Israel, Nicaragua to Afghanistan, she ties headlines and fragments using the equal sign, which she refers to as “a syntax that enables multiple places and times to coexist simultaneously.” Choi skilfully illustrates the cyclical, endless nature of violence to more deeply understand her home, herself, and the world.’ Publishers Weekly

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9781916751255

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Reviews

‘From Ethiopia to Israel, Nicaragua to Afghanistan, she ties headlines and fragments using the equal sign, which she refers to as “a syntax that enables multiple places and times to coexist simultaneously.” Choi skilfully illustrates the cyclical, endless nature of violence to more deeply understand her home, herself, and the world.’ Publishers Weekly ‘Choi has demonstrated her dutiful attention to language in her previous work as a translator and poet, but what compels me in this collection is her sustained, universal critique of violence in and beyond national bounds.’ Anabelle Johnston, Los Angeles Review of Books ‘The rewards across the three volumes in concert manifest not only through the cumulative effects of evidentiary fragmentation collaged in documents and reflections and photographs, but the collisions of tones, both typographical and textual.’ Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub ‘Choi, at the end of Mirror Nation, understands that she, too, is a divided country, a political person and a family person, one person who is consumed with history and grief and another person who stops to marvel at sparrows and swans.’ Terry Pitts, Vertigo

Author Information

Don Mee Choi is a translator and highly innovative poet. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Incorporating archives, photographs and fragments of memory, Choi’s poetry explores historical events and the human impact of war. Her books include DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

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