Commentary on the Birds

by Jed Munson

In his debut collection of essays, Jed Munson excavates the geopolitical reality and symbolic weight of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Drawing on his time as a Fulbright scholar, Munson explores the ecology of the DMZ—the cranes who live there and cross borders that remain deadly to humans—and the artwork that grapples with this inaccessible but calamitous place, a site of perpetual encounter and impasse. This book combines text and image, stories of trail-walking and of illness, and the author’s reflections on diasporic identity as a biracial Korean American. The result is a deeply moving work of memoir, cultural criticism, and ecological thinking for our time.

Open Prose Series

Commentary on the Birds is an eco-geopolitical hybrid narrative created from Jed Munson’s field work, field notes, criticism, and memoir. As a biracial Korean American, Munson’s navigation route to and from the DMZ on the Korean peninsula is often disjointed and disparate, yet such migratory pattern may be one of many identities and languages of diaspora itself. This brilliant book can also be read as a field guide to seeking and observing diasporic self and birds.
DON MEE CHOI

In lyric and documentary prose on themes of ecology and art, Jed Munson’s essays invite readers to consider the layered complexity of the Korean DMZ. Munson’s Commentary on the Birds is a daring act of the literary imaginary—that finds the connection between landscape and psyche. ERICA HUNT

This delirious DMZ, this travelogue of incisive blundering through collective fictions and negative space, this blowing of molten han into binoculars, joins a specific ecology that includes Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony and Na Mira’s The Book of Na, and is one of the most thoughtful, thought-provoking books of our century. BRANDON SHIMODA

Combining poetry, criticism, and (auto)ethnographic observation, Commentary on the Birds is a powerful contemplation of the Demilitarized Zone as a bounded geographic area, a product of unended war, a wilderness preserve, a subject of cultural production, and a psychic terrain. This book is a gift, and I'm grateful for it now more than ever. GRACE M. CHO

Genres: Nonfiction

149 pages, Paperback

Published October 24, 2023

Reviews

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

In one way, reading Jed Munson makes me grateful for Don Mee Choi’s book DMZ Colony, and all the perspective he’s added to my reading on it. There is so much critical and conceptual pressure applied to this narrow strip of land. Munson articulates its indeterminacy, in direct ways, familial ways, in an ecology that is both contradictory to its human origins (people being the ones to set the boundaries for this area) even as it is necessarily devoid of any humans, making its vibrant ecology possible. It’s an analysis and commentary that succeeds because of the book’s structure.

Though I’ll say it’s a structure requiring some patience to acclimate to. Or, for me, it was waiting for each chapter to inch me closer to the book’s central tenet. Though it might be the book would prefer evading anything resembling a central tenet. Or ducking out from the central tenet once a reader might have pressed out what they think the book is “really saying.” Because one thing the book is “really saying” is that it’s hard to really say anything. It’s really hard to locate yourself in a global world. And, yes, the DMZ serves an excellent analogy to this position. How, for Munson, it is a real gravitational geography (just like with Don Mee Choi!), because it disperses or diffuses whatever a writer might trying comparing to it.

Which is what makes the book’s penultimate chapter, “Two Views on Encounter and Impasse” such a feat for me. I want to hide it as a spoiler to the book, because its understanding of art aligned with DMZ is revelatory and concrete. How would a country coexist in time, what has happened to time when there is a definite segment of time that has redefined how anyone might look at history from the present time forward. Except through fantastical architecture. And a story that cannot really settle on a single reading. It’s like “look at what will never happen that people can plan to make”

[Stella · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this was interesting: a rumination of the literal and philosophical nature of the DMZ through the eyes of a member of Korea’s diaspora. Sadly, it was hard to read and I had to keep reminding myself that I had free will, but I persisted because the perspective was interesting enough. I knew it wasn’t for me with “You Were There” (30 pages too long for what it was).
Unfortunately, I found most of it self-indulgently boring. It seems like a book meant specifically for people in the author’s inner world. Often, I felt like it needed an editor to make it more readable and less flimsy. Sometimes, it felt like if a stranger published their Twitter feed. Like, good for you, but also how dare you.
What could’ve been universal and truly informative lacked commitment and grounding. It was heady in a way that made you feel like you needed to slow down to read it, but written in a way that felt surface-level. Like reading a journal of someone doing the bare-minimum to get their point across. Poetry as I understand it is meant to evoke. A lot of this book lacked any sort of feeling or eroticism. It alluded to it, but was too shy to express it. What’s the point!
However, I really liked the “Love in the DMZ” chapter and the anecdote about the author caring for his mother. My favorite line was something to the effect of “in the spirit world, where everything is steeped in blood.”

[Megan Gallardo · Rating 1 out of 5]

The horrors persist but so do I....