OSSIA

by Jimin Seo

The dead draw the living toward new language in Jimin Seo’s extraordinary debut poetry collection, OSSIA. Writing across Korean and English in poems that span a breadth of forms, Seo renders an entirely original map of the voice in its shifting address to a range of ghostly figures: his mother; old lovers; his late friend and mentor, the legendary poet-translator Richard Howard. Taking the cleaving mechanism of translation as a point of departure (“ossia” means “or rather” and is used to indicate an alternative way of playing a passage in a musical score), Seo’s intricate, polyvocal poems are rich with grief and radiant with the vivid charisma of specific people, specific love. What regions does the lyric mode chart that the dispassionate account cannot? How do present conditions of longing shape perceptions of the past? OSSIA surfaces the unsayable terrain of history, holding us in the complex coordinates of eros and education, origin and loss.

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2024

Reviews

[DeeSoul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Isn't learning a new language jus a new way
of saying the world we live in isn't enough?
- pg 42, "Richard Translates"

Richard, forget it. Forget the lesion in my voice, writes Seo in one of the collection's many epistles. Mirrored & translated from Korean on the next page: Erase it/ Erase the wounds hidden within that voice. It is the space between these translations that makes this debut so compelling. "Ossia" is a word referring to an alternative arrangement of music. OSSIA is a composition of choices. It is an elegy with a deer running through it, a conversation with ghosts in a hallway of mirrors & echoes. This collection pushes the reader to distill meaning from both what is represented on the page & what is buried underneath.

[Josh Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seo’s poetry chooses words like a sharpshooter with flower seeds for bullets. The germinated poems grow and compound into a delicacy. A feast for the mind and an enthralling saga.