Born in 1969, Suji Kwock Kim was educated at Yale College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Seoul National University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow. Her first book of poems, Notes from the Divided Country (2003) was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2002 Walt Whitman Award. Kim’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, DoubleTake, Yale Review, Salmagundi, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, and other journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as The Nation / “Discovery” Award and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, California Arts Council, Washington State Artist Trust, Korea Foundation and Blakemore Foundation for Asian Studies. Private Property, a multimedia play she co-wrote, was produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was featured on BBC-TV. She divides her time between San Francisco and New York.
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Notes from the Divided CountryPoemsFrom"Middle Kingdom"
Gruel, crumbs on a table
of ice, a labyrinth of snow:
and infinite distances
in the small box of the kitchen.
Mother chopped pieces
of her heart into the skillet.
Brother and I heard oil sizzle
until we huddled in shame.
She salted the meat with tears.
She cried if we ate
and cried if we refused to eat,
warning You’ll go hungry.
Notes from the Divided Country:Poems -
Notes from the Divided CountryPoemsFrom"Animal Farm, or Song of the Colonial Governor-General"
Admit it. You hate the body
because it can be broken,
stabbed, shot full of holes.
And so you become a butcher.
Say the spirit cannot be broken.
Say you see better than anyone
how fiercely an ox, a hog, a cock
fights to stay alive, until the end.
You wonder how nothing seems
to stop this rat: sucking, gnawing
through cement walls to snatch
scraps of gristle – not knowing
what you need to kill, or why.
Beat it with a shovel: skin-slither,
pestle of skull and will. Admit
it shamed you to cover with dung.
Notes from the Divided Country:Poems -
Notes from the Divided CountryPoemsFrom"Monologue for an Onion"
I don’t mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body, layer by layer,
The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills
With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of the pursuit.
Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.
Hunt all you want. Beneath each layer of mine
Lies another skin: I am pure onion – pure onion
Of outside and in, surface and secret core.
Notes from the Divided Country:Poems
“Suji Kwock Kim has written a book of unforgettable poems; she has found a way, through the medium of language, to allow readers into a double consciousness that is, finally, the poet's undivided mind.” —Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review [on Notes From the Divided Country]
“Suji Kwock Kim's first book, Notes From the Divided Country, moves fluently between the living and the dead, the Korean past and the Amerasian present. Her heartfelt work is shadowed by the question of what is passed on through a long, blood-soaked history. She tracks the generations through strong poems for her great-grandparents, her grandmother, her father and, especially, her mother. She also traces the tormented, catastrophic history of countless others, many of them nameless, who figured in the making of more than half-a-million new Americans.” —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World
“Suji Kwock Kim’s title Notes From the Divided Country refers not only to the Koreas North and South and to all the Americas, but also to the countries of the mind. Traveling between past and present, Kim’s powerful fictive imagination creates almost unbearably realistic enactments of war-zones once inhabited by her parents, grandparents, and even her great-grandparents . . . Suji Kwock Kim celebrates being alive and well in the complexities of the present moment.” —Griffin International Poetry Prize, Judges’ Citation (Billy Collins, Bill Manhire, Phyllis Webb)