A Drink of Red Mirror

Book excerpt: Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Translated from the Korean by Jiwon Shin, Lauren Albin, and Sue Hyon Bae. A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon's surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, her works translated to Chinese, Swedish, English, French, German, Dutch, and beyond. In A DRINK OF RED MIRROR, Kim Hyesoon raises a glass to the reader in the form of a series of riddles, poems conjuring the you inside the me, the night inside the day, the outside inside the inside, the ocean inside the tear. Kim's radical, paradoxical intimacies entail sites of pain as well as wonder, opening onto impossible--which is to say, visionary--vistas. Again and again, in these poems as across her career, Kim unlocks a horizon inside the vanishing point.