The Salt Dress Inside Me

by Kim Hyesoon

This pocket-sized paperback is one of the twenty-two titles published for 2015 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. The theme of IPHHK2015 is -Poetry and Conflict-. 21 international poets from 18 different places are invited to participate in recitations, symposia and sharing sessions of the Poetry Nights. A recitation focusing on 10 local Hong Kong poets, -Hong Kong Cantonese Poetry Night- is included. This collection seeks to make accessible the best of contemporary international poetry with outstanding translations.

90 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2016

About the author

Born in Ulijin, South Korea, Kim Hyesoon (1955-) received her PhD in Korean Literature from Konkuk University, and began as a poet in 1979 with the publication of Poet Smoking a Cigarette. She began to receive critical acclaim in the late 1990s and she attributes this to the strong wave of interest in poetry by woman poets; currently she is one of South Korea’s most important contemporary poets, and she now lives and teaches in Seoul. Her poetry aims to strive for a freedom from form, by experimenting with language focusing on the sensual - often female - body, in direct opposition to male-dominated lyrical poetry. ‘They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women.’

Having published more than ten poetry collections, a number of these have been translated into English recently: When the Plug Gets Unplugged (2005); Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014) and I’m O.K., I’m Pig (2014). Tinfish has also published a small chapbook of three essays entitled Princess Abandoned (2012).

Throughout her career she has gained nearly all of South Korea’s most prestigious literary awards, named after the country’s greatest poets, such as Kim Su-yông Literature Award (1997), the Sowol Poetry Literature Award (2000) and the Midang Literature Award (2006). She was also the first female to win the Daesan Literary Award in 2008.

Reviews

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

My head responded to waves of translation of a person whose eyes can see worlds my own cannot, and I am thankful for her temporary gift.

[jess liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Salt Dress Inside Me"

When sorrow is endured, salt gets excreted from
your body
Your salty-salty expression
Your animal gaze
like a lonely island hammered by the sea

Some days when there is a high-sea warning
seawater gushes in over the short eyelash fences
but the salt’s architecture doesn’t crumble
salt-flowers bloom from my fingertips like stinging sobs

Salt, turns my fallen shadow into powder and scatters
it under the streetlamps
Salt, persists in me like the sea’s architecture

Salt, we embrace tightly and try
to capture the sea in each other

The salt pond is at work as soon as I’m awake
I listen to the rising sea architecture

I am wearing the salt dress
inside me
(Translated by Don Mee Choi)