Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream
Translated by Don Mee Choi
About
Kim Hye-sun's poetry is not ironic. It is direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral, and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women — poetry that uses the body as its primary territory and refuses to be polite about what it finds there. Translated by Don Mee Choi, these poems operate at the intersection of the political and the physical, treating language itself as a site of resistance. The title — Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream — signals the collection's method: domestic objects estranged from their functions, mundane words made strange and newly dangerous. Poetry that insists on the body's right to be ugly, loud, and ungovernable — from one of Korea's most radical literary voices.