Autobiography of Death
Translated by Don Mee Choi
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Forty-nine poems, each representing a single day the spirit wanders after death before entering the cycle of reincarnation. Kim Hyesoon gives voice to Korea's unjust dead — the massacred, the buried, the erased — while mapping what she calls "the structure of death, that we remain living in." The plural "you" speaks as a body beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. Kim writes with the ferocity of someone channeling rather than composing — her images bleed between myth and politics, the everyday and the impossible, the personal and the national. The volume closes with "Face of Rhythm," turning from collective trauma to individual pain with devastating intimacy. Autobiography of Death is Korean poetry at its most necessary: a séance for a nation's unquiet dead.
