Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream Paperback Poetry. East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean

by Kim Hyesoon

Poetry. East Asia Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. "Her poems are not ironic. They are 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"--Pam Brown

Genres: Poetry, Feminism

106 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2011

About the author

Born in Ulijin, South Korea, Kim Hyesoon (1955-) received her PhD in Korean Literature from Konkuk University, and began as a poet in 1979 with the publication of Poet Smoking a Cigarette. She began to receive critical acclaim in the late 1990s and she attributes this to the strong wave of interest in poetry by woman poets; currently she is one of South Korea’s most important contemporary poets, and she now lives and teaches in Seoul. Her poetry aims to strive for a freedom from form, by experimenting with language focusing on the sensual - often female - body, in direct opposition to male-dominated lyrical poetry. ‘They are 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.’

Having published more than ten poetry collections, a number of these have been translated into English recently: When the Plug Gets Unplugged (2005); Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014) and I’m O.K., I’m Pig (2014). Tinfish has also published a small chapbook of three essays entitled Princess Abandoned (2012).

Throughout her career she has gained nearly all of South Korea’s most prestigious literary awards, named after the country’s greatest poets, such as Kim Su-yông Literature Award (1997), the Sowol Poetry Literature Award (2000) and the Midang Literature Award (2006). She was also the first female to win the Daesan Literary Award in 2008.

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The body is a sick place. Its reality is viscera. Kim Hyesoon’s poems are composed of these unsightly and unpleasant viscera. They squirm, blind and deaf like newborn puppies, then grow up and live in a dog-eat-dog world. This world is called Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream.

my review for Hyperallergic Weekend:
http://hyperallergic.com/120043/the-s...

[Donald Armfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my second Hyesoon collection. Her style is such sorrow, bashful, yet brutally honest. The title of the collection caught my eye as one of those titles you just have to read or own. Not much of it did good for me I enjoyed her other collection “Autobiography of Death”
Favorites:

-Ghost School
-The Salt Dress Inside Me
-Moon Bead Necklace
-Influenza
Blood Blooms

[Fergus Nm · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What do you want to be when you die?
I'm going to be something that has no borders"
- Saturn's Sleeping Pill

[Heather Gibbons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection. I wrote a mini-review for Tarpaulin Sky: https://tarpaulinsky.com/2018/03/heat...

[Rachel Atakpa]

“I want to blow my nose but there’s no tissue in the Zen room. Don’t the monks ever have a runny nose?”

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

soil--the thing that's not at the flowerhouse, really
Sky--the thing that's not at the birdhouse, really
Ocean--the thing that's not at the fishhouse, really

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

From an essay by the poet at the end of this spectacular collection:

"I thought to myself that I needed to reinvent my mother tongue. I decided to explore in my own voice the possibilities of the sensory; I decided to believe in my own feminine individuation, its secrets. For me the vast open field of the unknown and the prison existed simultaneously. Toda, the young Korean women poets are developing a terrain of poetry that is combative, visceral, subversive, inventive, and ontologically feminine."

She is the best.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is rad. Strange, trippy, grotesque, surreal with some illuminating interviews at the end with the author, who seems like a super bad-ass lady navigating and winning literature in South Korea. Gets me thinking if the only true surreal/avant garde PIO (poetry in opposition) can be written by women.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woah, dude. Recommended if you enjoy the syntax and images that come part and parcel with works in translations. Also, some of this is weird because it is weird, regardless of your cultural lens. Grotesque and angry and, yes, sorrowful.

[david · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Dusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

whoa

[Kate]

Rereading this brilliant book for podcast purposes.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I finished it. This was very, very weird. The back cover describes the poems as "direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral, and somatic." It is 100% correct. I'm not sure that this type of contemporary avant-garde poetry is really my cup of tea. I definitely didn't like the poet's style, but it also definitely evoked emotion and strong feelings in me. So while I gave this a low rating, that doesn't mean it was a bad book!

[Krys]

Oppression rooted in the language of the feminine, made visceral, made grotesque and bizarre with cartoonish violence. I thought of Hilda Hilst's woman/pig-child in The Obscene Madame D.

Buttocks-cloud came down from the ceiling
Those buttocks belong to the wrestler at our neighbourhood gym

A rope for strangling came down, but it dispersed as soon as it hanged a neck
The walls floated in air and barked
The door opened to the room where the angels were tortured and had cried
My screams poured out like shit, so I opened an umbrella to receive them