Kasey reviews Mommy

Kasey, the new "constant critic," reviews "Mommy Must Be A Fountain of Feathers," Don Mee Choi's translation of Kim Hyesoon's poems over at the Constant Critic.

This is the beginning of the review:

I saw Don Mee Choi reading some of the poems of Kim Hyesoon’s she had translated for the Tinfish chapbook When the Plug Gets Unplugged (2005) a couple of years ago at a conference in Austin, and had an experience I don’t often have at poetry readings: I was genuinely disturbed, made viscerally nervous, as though one thing had been peeled back to reveal something else, something I didn’t necessarily want to see. That same feeling revisits me upon reading the collection of Kim’s work recently published by Action Books (and incorporating the poems in When the Plug), Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers. Kim’s surrealism is not a precious affectation or a sterile literary convention, but a way of conveying nightmarish states of existence through the most effective means available [...] a beauty, like Rilke’s, that threatens to be more than one can bear.