Just Like

Lee Sumyeong's Just Like is a first collection of poems in English by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics, breaking with traditional syntax and disrupting perceptions of how language works. It establishes Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation with Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, and refigures the mundane in a darkly inverted congener to Alfred Starr Hamilton. The poems exhibit a tension between clarity and complexity, with Lee's writing appearing austere but teeming with unstable concrete objects and simple propositions that buckle and fissure.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 80 pages
Publication date: 20 June 2024
Publisher: Black Ocean

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics. These poems build strikingly on the breakthroughs of Korean forebears like Yi Sang and Oh Kyu-won. They also establish Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation: her problematized repetitions chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton. Marked by a distinctive voice and approach, Just Like introduces a brilliant and singular contemporary Korean writer into English. The poems of Lee Sumyeong's Just Like evince a striking tension between clarity and complexity. Purged of any heightened diction or preciously wrought syntax, Lee's writing can give the impression of being austere to the point of crystallinity. But it is the opposite—a teeming space where concrete objects become unstable and where simple propositions constantly buckle and fissure.

Weight: 180g
Dimension: 153 x 191 x 10 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781939568755