95 Books In 2006, George W. Bush read 95 books. We will do better.

Donato Mancini has been ranting and raving about this book of poetry by prominent South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, translated by American Don Mee Choi, for the past half-year or so, and I finally had the opportunity to borrow it from him the other night. I finished it in the same day. These poems are embodied, grotesque, brutal, full of rats and dogs and filth and hell. They approach, but never quite reach, a point of over-saturation that bleeds into the farcical. As Don Mee Choi notes in her translator’s introductory note, “Everything breaks and everything gets eaten as ‘Seoul eats and shits through the same door’ from ‘the desire of the abandoned woman wanting to raise an abandoned woman’ which Kim says ‘leads to the creation of a feminine text. No, it is the text that moves towards desire’.”

But this desire is sick, the mommies and daddies are sick, the body is sick, the “poor love machine” is sick. I recommend this book, but only for those of strong constitution.

-Nikki