Synopses & Reviews
A powerful work of cultural memory that recovers voices from Korea's heartbreakingly violent postcolonial history.
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
Review
"Choi's hybrid structure allows her, in some sense, to have it both ways — to look at her subjects while simultaneously, and paradoxically, showing that some subjects are just too big to see in full: war, your parents' life before and without you, your government and its decisions." Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Review
"Choi's hybrid structure allows her, in some sense, to have it both ways — to look at her subjects while simultaneously, and paradoxically, showing that some subjects are just too big to see in full: war, your parents' life before and without you, your government and its decisions." Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Review
"Don Mee Choi writes about violence and injustice in modalities that are neither sentimental, obvious, or pornographic." Forrest Gander
About the Author
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.