Penury

"Avant gardist Kim's fifth book is a diligent inquiry into the relationship between language and power." --Publishers Weekly "Though [Kim's] work is philosophical in its searches, it's always rooted in the concrete of language ... It is as if language is philosophical and must abscess to be concrete." -- Globe and Mail "Extracts the sparest of reactions and reflections to global politics, colonization, immigration and other issues in fragmented form that takes the blank page as a kind of force field for splinters of language and images. The result is gnomic, austere and obliquely intense." --Memphis Commercial Appeal "An immensely talented poet, Myung Mi Kim loves language--its internal rhymes, alliterations, and diverse rhythms. Caught off guard by the beauty and precision of Kim's language and the exquisite images she so deftly conjures, we are drawn unwittingly into a web of fragmentary memories that subvert what we think we know about the violent history that haunts her." --Elaine Kim, author, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context "[In Myung Mi Kim's work] historically specific scenes are interwoven with hallucinatory fragments, reminding us of poetry's oldest concerns with destruction, diaspora, and the preservation of the human figure from oblivion." -- Multicultural Review