명랑하라 팜 파탈

by Kim Yideum, 김이듬

섹시한 은유와 도발적인 상상력으로 몸을 경쾌하게 시로 다루었던 첫 시집 이후, 더욱 도발적인 제목으로 2년 만에 두 번째 시집을 펴낸 김이듬 시인의 『명랑하라 팜 파탈』이 문학과지성사에서 출간되었다.
감정이입이라는 여성적 원리가 시에서 어떻게 작동하는지를 감각적으로 보여주었던 김이듬 시인의 감성 실험에서 가장 중요한 것은 육체였다. 가장 정직하다고 믿을 수 있는 것은 지식도 지성도 아닌, 감각의 총화로서 몸밖에 없기 때문이다. 그래서 김이듬 시인은 “육체의 감각 밑에서 시를 발굴한다”는 평을 받기도 했다.

Genres: Poetry, Womens

168 pages, ebook

First published November 30, 2007

About the author

Kim Yi-deum was born in Jinju, South Korea and raised in Busan. She studied German literature at Pusan National University, and earned her doctoral degree in Korean literature at Gyeongsang National University. She made her literary debut when the quarterly journal Poesie published “The Bathtubs” (욕조 a에서 달리는 욕조 A를 지나) and six other poems in its Fall 2001 Issue. Her poems have attracted attention for their sensual imagination and violence.

Kim was a radio host for “Kim Yi-deum’s Monday Poetry Picks” (김이듬의 월요시선), which aired on KBS Radio Jinju. In 2012, she spent a semester at the Free University of Berlin as a writer in residence, sponsored by Arts Council Korea. Based on her experience there, she wrote her fourth poetry collection Bereulin, dalemui norae (베를린, 달렘의 노래 Song of Berlin, Dahlem), published by Lyric Poetry and Poetics in 2013. She also participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Reviews

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite things put out by Action Books while I've been at Notre Dame. The tone is abrasive, almost incantory, and each poem has a way of spiraling around some absent center that I really appreciated. These are very intense poems, always opening themselves up and tearing themselves apart; and it was especially striking to hear them read in a (conservative) public space earlier this week, then to come and see how privately they sit on the page. There's an almost anti-lyricism that runs through this book, a sort of very personal, very raw intensity, which I think is where a lot of its power comes from, and it's great to see the very different forms that takes throughout different parts of the collection.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is up now at Fanzine -- excerpt:
It’s a witchy, traumatized book. At turns flippant, mordant, grieving, confrontational, Kim’s poems swing wildly, and the punches that land are both comedic, and hurt. Many are populated by grotesque objects; many operate in a Gurlesque mode. Especially in the first two sections, Kim’s poems are delivered by an unstable, polyvocal “I”, an incoherent subjectivity we might call, via the title, the femme fatale. Kim’s femme fatale is dangerously charming, languid, shockingly morbid. Her smile is a leer; her wink a nervous tic; she will not cheer up.
More here: http://thefanzine.com/undead-poets-so...

[Agnieszka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wzięta przeze mnie w bibliotece w samym sercu Seulu jako nieliczna w języku angielskim. Nie żałuję wyboru.

[Leia Penina · Rating 5 out of 5]

holy fuck yes.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primal and focused poetry questioning South Korean patriarchy, tradition, and family. The final third of the collection--when Kim moved away from prose poems--felt the strongest to me, as I underlined multiple poems.

[Abigail Zimmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me awhile to settle into this book, jarred by what felt like so much self-pity and an intention to shock. And then you kind of fall in love with her. Her strange images that jump around, her immediate pairing of something transcendent with something gross (“the rat’s guts squirm with sugar pearls”), her frequent claims about poetry and life followed by her admission that “actually, she doesn’t really know,” and her humor (“my bed—which is in love with me—keeps saying, Let’s go flying, let’s split up”).

She’s so chatty and outrageous and then pulls back abruptly, questioning the efficacy of speaking. “No matter how much noise I make / will things ever become fair for the wild rats and cats? Whose snout is drooling out these lines?” And later: “Ah, how should I say it? Okay, I won’t.” There’s vulnerability in the wildness, but as she writes: “I love you and I love this amazing disaster.” (!!!)

The translator’s notes were also fascinating, sharing how Kim’s disappearing and mutating subjects aren’t just aesthetic choices but a response to the violence of modern Korean history. Her poems let loose a country’s repressed memories and emotions, the subjects often emerging into squeezed and grotesque forms. The translator also notes her destabilized syntax, which added to the difficulty of translation but was powerful to Kim’s Korean readers. Writing of one of Kim’s contemporaries who had a similar aesthetic, the translator says that “because his poems weren’t stable or safely interpretable,” they threatened those in power who leaned on colonial oppression. With that lens, Kim makes her poems—and the act of reading them—an intriguing form of subterfuge.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too difficult for me. I enjoyed the ones I understood.

[World Literature Today]

“The qualified, elliptical stance is telling; here is a vaudevillian poetry stylizing the banality of consumption as a mania of excess that, as Ji Yoon Lee asserts, overlays “a foundation of violence, death, and trauma, the emotional charge of which is not [yet] relieved.” Kim Yideum’s texts can be read as allegories, tiny epics, and morality tales; this is a samizdat scrutinizing a country where everything—maybe anything—is for sale; acting as if “a clerk at a résumé service” and taking down a necessary dictation, Kim is compelled to record her “emptiness sutra[s]” that reveal, finally, an emergent posthuman condition.” - Dan Disney


This book was reviewed in the January/February 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems dig into finding a sense if other in the self, alternately dirty and deep, this collection kind of knocked my socks off. Each poem felt like a new prose terrain I had to learn how to read, like learning the body of another, this was well worth the invitation, the effort to see where it would go.

[Sheena Carroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never get over this book.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rebellious and remarkably accessible (for a poetic work in translation) collection of poems that conjure traumatic and erotic moments and intermingle them. Deftly manages to be irascible, humorous, sexy, and mournful at once. Recommended.

[Sherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book of poetry in translation (in this case, Korean), not about love, for the Read Harder Challenge. I wanted to read something edgy. This definitely was. "When I take a walk on the bridge with my dead cat in my arms, people say strange things to me."