Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition

by Sora Y. Han

In March 2020, Sora Y. Han learned her father was dying of cancer just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on California shores. These two events lead Han to “Who have I been writing to?” and “Who have I been writing for?” In observance of the 49 days of mourning in Buddhist tradition, answers come in the form of mu – no thing , nothingness . Han’s poetic meditations on freedom struggle come alive in the empty spaces between words, letters, and pictograms spanning her many languages—English, Korean, Chinese, jazz, law, and poetry. Transliterating and dystranslating the writing of Fred Moten, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and others through the Korean alphabet, Han weaves the DMZ, Betty’s Case, the Thirteenth Amendment, Afro-pessimism, and psychoanalytic desire together into the open field of Bay Area radicalism. Mu is both a loving homage to and playful subversion of political inheritances and the unsayable beyond law.

Genres: Poetry

280 pages, Hardcover

Published March 22, 2024

Reviews

[Aidan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m an undergrad and i set out to write my senior thesis on nothingness and contemporary poetry, unconscious relation, phonemic linguistics beyond and between colonial and racist (un)reason.

this book just… does that. and better than anything i can ever write. while i’m excited to be writing something next to this book, around it, through it; to entangle, weave, share, distance; the subject is now; i’m also horribly anxious, because now i see what could be done, what has been done, and now i have to look a little to the left or right.

seriously, without exaggeration, this book changed and will continue to change for me what it means to live in this world. brilliance, inchoate, incarnate.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

How in the hell am I the first to review this f-ing excellent book? It’s an absolute joy to read and re-read and listen in on. Working the shoreline between theory and poetry, law-making and breaking; Han gives fresh (and floppy) perspectives on prison abolition, black lives, and colonialism. Heart. Heart. Heart.