Choi, Don Mee: DMZ Colony

Description

Wave Books, paperback

Publication Date: April 7, 2020

Publisher Marketing: WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

“Don Mee Choi’s urgentDMZ Colonycaptures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but ‘during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.’ Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and handwritten texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all ‘victims of History, ‘ so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.”–Judges’ Citation

Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’sDMZ Colonyis atour de forceof personal and political reckoning set over eight acts.Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said’s notion of “the intertwined and overlapping histories” in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book,Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.