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Mirror Nation
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Check link for latest rating. ( 105 ratings, 23 reviews)
Brief Description
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020). Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedes Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory...
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Description
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).
Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedes Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes a catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts co-mingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective.
Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi's DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a "magnetic field of memory," proving that history doesn't merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781950268931
Publisher: Wave Books
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 16 May 2024
Country: United States
Imprint: Wave Books
Illustration: Illustrations
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 175.0mm
Height: 152.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 152
Collections
About the Author
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several pamphlets of poems and essays. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Also by Don Mee Choi
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DMZ Colony
Finalist for the US National Book Award for Poetry 2020 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...Paperback$5800Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
Hardly War
Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's major second collection, defies history, national identity, and militarism. Using artifacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here, poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire. Like fried potato...PaperbackSold Out
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