Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

by Joan Kwon Glass

Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is part lamentation and part hymn—an illumination of diasporic hungers, hauntings, absence, and resilience. With echoes of the thirty-six hungry ghosts in Korean Buddhism running through the text, Joan Kwon Glass’s collection travels from the early twentieth century Japanese occupation of Korea to the landscapes of 1980s suburban Detroit, from Jeju Island’s caves and the DMZ to Connecticut’s shoreline, and from the winter Olympics in Pyeongchang to the pews of midwestern churches. Cast across continents and centuries, matrilineage and inherited silences, Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms explores colonialism and “postcolonialism” through disordered eating, suicide loss, religious damage, familial estrangement, addiction, motherhood, and recovery. These poems ask urgent What does it mean to be a mixed-race survivor of generational traumas in a world that often insists on binaries and singular narratives? What role does “hunger” play in navigating life in the diaspora? And, ultimately, what is required to raise an American daughter while forging a path forward?

Genres: Poetry

85 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2024

About the author

Joan Kwon Glass serves as poet laureate for the city of Milford, Connecticut, and as poetry co-editor for West Trestle Review. Her poems have recently been published or are forthcoming in Diode, The Rupture, Rattle, The Hellbore, Pirene’s Fountain, Dialogist, South Florida Poetry Journal, Rust & Moth, Honey Literary, SWWIM, and many others. Joan has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Reviews

[Ann Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one powerful and expansive collection, traveling across time and continents. The inheritance of trauma in these poems about a Korean-American family takes shape in very real ways — devastating losses and betrayals, controlled and uncontrolled appetites, silences and the search for language. Glass is able to cut through to the heart of things with her sometimes startlingly direct language and wry humor.

[Beathebug · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very powerful book of poems that express what we often cannot say out loud about adult children with their parents. Korea has been a significant part of her life though Ms. Glass is clearly an American writer. She writes of Hungry Ghosts which is a Buddhist concept. She writes about recovery and being a mother.

I look forward to reading her other collections.

[Nancy Rappaport · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evocative and precise and so well done ! Highly recommend

[Brett Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

So happy to see that Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms (Perugia Press, 2024) by Joan Kwon Glass has won the 2025 Paterson Poetry Prize AND the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry.

I just finished this book as part of my practice of reading one poem each morning to work my way through my piles of poetry books, and I can tell you that there were quite a few mornings when I couldn’t stop after just one poem.

I was all in from the first one, "Bloodline." I'm not sure I've ever read a short poem that holds so much. The last poem, “Armistice,” just floored me. And every poem in between!

Dark and luminous, resonant and richly detailed, this collection’s themes of erasure, persistence, beauty, and survival are so relevant in a time when many of us are thinking about our ancestors—where they came from, how they came to be here and why, how their lives continue to influence ours, what they would think of America today.

But this book is about much more than that. Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is elegant and vivid, escapist and immersive, seamlessly traveling through Korea, America, the past, the present, into and out of the spirit realms. You need this book!

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of poems about identity, family, loss, grief, survival. These poems make the reader ache with longing and with sadness. Highly recommended!

from Seoul Station to Daegu Station, 2001: "In the end, they chose to love one another / in spite of the heartache, the disappointments. / I will not understand the miracle of this / until much later in my life."

from Garland-Eating Hungry Ghost: "How many calories / are there in a flower? / If I tear a chain of marigolds / into tiny pieces, will I / feel full faster? / Now that I'm dead, / do carbs count / less?"

from Foodless Hungry Ghost: "In my next life, I'm coming back / as a houseplant. Something ordinary, / that won't expect more / than the bare minimum. / Something easy to keep alive / in poor conditions."

[DeeSoul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms is a collection marked by time & hunger. In it, histories merge & weave & overlap, some ending before their time while others ponder the time they have. I appreciate the honesty and vulnerability of this collection, its conformability with frustration. When surrounded by ghosts, what do we do with God? In a loved one's absence, what do we fill ourselves with? What do we do with our history? What happens next?

[Lisa Stice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part Korean colonial history, part family history, part how the two are connected, 100% a fantastic poetry collection.