Phantom Pain Wings

Author: Hyesoon, Kim

South Korea

Published on 12 November 2024 by And Other Stories in the United Kingdom.

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)2024 Poetry Book Society Translation ChoiceKim 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, Agnès 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