What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?
Arlene Kim's debut poetry collection explores immigration, memory, and myth through layered, dreamlike poems.
Work Information
Language mythologizes memory and reshapes the idea of home.
The collection draws on Korean folklore, fairy tales, and private memory to create a searching account of displacement and identity.
Review Summaries
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Readers see it as a striking debut that layers imagery with questions of immigration, memory, and belonging.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Milkweed Editions
- Published
- 2011-07-19
- Pages
- 96 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.15 x 1.09 x 21.67 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781571314406
- ISBN-10
- 1571314407
- Price
- 2832 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
In her stunning debut poetry collection, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? , Arlene Kim confronts the ways in which language mythologizes memory and, thus, exiles us from our own true histories. Juxtaposing formal choices and dreamlike details, Kim explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigrationthe abandoned country known only through stories, the new country into which the immigrant family must wander ever deeper, and the numerous points where these narratives intertwine. Sharing ground with Randall Jarrell’s later poems, and drawing on a dizzying array of sourcesincluding Grimm’s Fairy Tales , Korean folklore, Turkish proverbs, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Antonin Dvorak’s letters, and the numerous fictions we script across the inscrutabilities of the natural worldKim reveals how a homesickness for the self is universal. It is this persistent and incurable longing that drives us as we make our way through the dark woods of our lives, following what might or might not be a trail of breadcrumbs, discovering, finally, that we are the only path.”
Reviews
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When I read Arlene Kims poetry I feel a part of my brain which had been dorment for too long coming back to life. I have always enjoyed poetry but as life took over it is something I lost but with this book it has come back to like for me. The poems range in topic but each one has layers and I see them in different ways with each read and re-read. I think this is probably something that can move all levels of poetry lovers, novice to master. I have already shared it with friends, I feel like this is a must for any library.
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With a nod to collage, Arlene Kim plays with stories and language to create a narrative that meanders and builds as the collection unfolds. Drawing from disparate traditions, the poems explore issues of origin and loss through pathways that embody both the history of stories and of individual lives. The language is fresh and playful and the stories echo.