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Unexpected Vanilla
Shortlisted, 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry
Shortlisted, 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize
A sensual, surrealist collection by a young feminist poet, in an equally sensuous and sensitive queer translation.
Lee Hyemi’s poetry is characterized by fluidity and wetness, with subjects moving about and soaking in each other through curious means.
Unexpected Vanilla’s exchange of liquids often involves sex, but intercourse can be drinking tea or alcohol, going to the beach, sitting in the same tub, crying, feeling your lover’s sweat on your palm. In this way, Lee explores a wide variety of relationships, attractions, and sensations. Her erotically charged, surrealist sensibility can be traced back to the paintings of Leonor Fini, a bisexual Argentinian artist whom she admires. Lee subverts the titular “vanilla” norm without denying its pleasures.
Detailing various intimacies in her “world of the second person,” which still feels clandestine but safe from the threat of exposure, Lee explores the Korean language’s scope for ambiguous gendering. The task of the queer translator is to feel out the subtleties with respect, as one does in life, and not presume heterosexuality. Just as Lee spoke out during the 2016 hashtag movement that began calling out sexual violence within South Korean literary circles, her poems recreate and hold space for agency and queerness in women’s sexuality.
Shortlisted, 2022 Sarah Maguire Prize
A sensual, surrealist collection by a young feminist poet, in an equally sensuous and sensitive queer translation.
Lee Hyemi’s poetry is characterized by fluidity and wetness, with subjects moving about and soaking in each other through curious means.
Unexpected Vanilla’s exchange of liquids often involves sex, but intercourse can be drinking tea or alcohol, going to the beach, sitting in the same tub, crying, feeling your lover’s sweat on your palm. In this way, Lee explores a wide variety of relationships, attractions, and sensations. Her erotically charged, surrealist sensibility can be traced back to the paintings of Leonor Fini, a bisexual Argentinian artist whom she admires. Lee subverts the titular “vanilla” norm without denying its pleasures.
Detailing various intimacies in her “world of the second person,” which still feels clandestine but safe from the threat of exposure, Lee explores the Korean language’s scope for ambiguous gendering. The task of the queer translator is to feel out the subtleties with respect, as one does in life, and not presume heterosexuality. Just as Lee spoke out during the 2016 hashtag movement that began calling out sexual violence within South Korean literary circles, her poems recreate and hold space for agency and queerness in women’s sexuality.
81 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 20, 2020
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 15, 2025
I loved this so much, I could cry. So rich and lush and heady and all things stellar!
And for it to be a translated collection and hit so hard just shows the wonderful talent in both author and translator.
Definitely a 2025 favorite.
And for it to be a translated collection and hit so hard just shows the wonderful talent in both author and translator.
Definitely a 2025 favorite.
Displaying 1 of 1 review