A ground-breaking new collection of queer poetry from a leading contemporary Korean poet. Kim Hyun's Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection. Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim's fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making. His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures. They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithetical to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns. After all, like LGBTQ+ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence. Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyun's form. Glory Hole invites readers into a very queer world.
South Korean author Kim Hyun has published four volumes of poems and six essay collections, and he has co-authored several queer novels and anthologies. Suhyun J. Ahn is a PhD candidate studying East Asian philosophy and politics. By day, Archana Madhavan is a technical writer helping people to make data-driven decisions. By night, she is a fitful writer and a budding translator of Korean literature and comics.
Title: Glory Hole (The Pride List)
Author: Hyun, Kim
ISBN: 9780857429872
Binding:
Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
Publication Date: 2022-05-20
Number of Pages: 264
Weight: 0.3501 kg
As a whole [these poems] showcase a singular creative mastery. With as little interference as possible, the translators facilitated a smooth transition from Korean to English, maintaining the richness of the original. The point and the goal of the pieces that make up Glory Hole is to invite the impenetrable and the subversive into the light. * Foreword *