Lady No

by Kim Hyesoon

Lady No has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Genres: Poetry

1 pages, Audio CD

Expected publication April 14, 2026

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

[Mai H.]

Manse March TBR

National Poetry Month TBR

Women in Translation TBR

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Ecco

[Alicia Garcia-Webster · Rating 2 out of 5]

My daughter, when she was three, would sometimes scream for no reason. Her father, her sister, her brother, and I would all look at her with bemusement. "Who screams just for the sake of screaming?", we asked ourselves. Those moments with my youngest child came to mind when I was reading this book. Poem after poem after poem of non-stop screeching, with seemingly no purpose to it. Which isn't to say that it wasn't mildly entertaining at times, or that the arrangement of words wasn't appealing on the page. But it seemed so utterly performative, non unlike the cries of my three-year-old in the aisle of Walmart. All this flailing and railing against something-clearly-, but what? Angst and fury directed at an unrequited this and an unrecognizable that. But when I looked into the dark corner, to which the author was pointing, all I saw were dust bunnies and cobwebs. The bogeyman, who the poet with every fiber of her being, insisted was there, simply failed to materialize. Most of the poetry came across as rebellion simply for the sake of it. There was no clear adversary, just the constant shouting into the wind. Fans of avant garde or modern art might be able to extract something meaningful from this collection of poetry, but I was left unmoved. ** This ARC was provided by the publisher, but all opinions are my own.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A full release of a poetry chapbook that was originally released as individual weekly entries in a newspaper over a period of time. Some absolutely amazing, hard hitting poems in here though, and an introduction that gives us context about who this poet is within the South Korean literary scene. This comes out in April, and is a highly recommended preorder from me.