Under Flag

by Myung Mi Kim

"One is shaken by this severe and quiet telling... Myung Mi Kim's language is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge" (Kathleen Fraser).

In "Under Flag," winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." ("Body As One As History"). The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, "a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized."

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, School

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Myung Mi Kim was born in Seoul, Korea. She immigrated with her family to the United States at the age of nine and was raised in the Midwest. She earned a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from The Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her collection of poems Under Flag (1991) won the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Award of Merit; subsequent collections include The Bounty (1996), DURA (1999), Commons (2002), River Antes (2006), and Penury (2009).

Myung Mi Kim is the subject of the book The Subject of Building Is a Process / Light Is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (2008). She has taught at San Francisco State University and in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, where she is the James H. McNulty Chair of English.

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable chapbook whose densest, thickest points lay in the empty spaces it leaves, the questions it rests and then raises from the dead. I can't get over how effectively Kim twists and ultimately undoes english, as if unloading a weapon and laying bullets bare for us to see, in order to retrace a collective trauma no language can appropriately capture. Between her keen ear for sound and rhythm and clever use of space, Myung Mi Kim's "Under Flag" is a must-read, and a masterclass in Mad poetry that dances at the edge of the legible.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Innovative fragmented poetry which explores borders, language, translation, silence via the grammar and absences of militarised speech, society and archives. Book produces a hallucinatory glossary of its own: 'Faces spread in a field / On the breeze what might be azaleas in full bloom / Composed of many lengths of bone'. Slim book but certainly, in retrospect, a hugely important publication in 1991 for the Asian-American avant-garde.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kim's first poetry collection is more decipherable than later collections, as her fragmentary and associative wordplay is still coming into its own. Here, themes are more understandable which makes this a good collection to prepare for the later Penury (2009) or Civil Bound (2019). "Into Such Assembly" is the strongest multi-page work for me, resounding and ricocheting with images and history in equal measure.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Near and dear to my heart. Myung Mi Kim's poetry always astonishes with its linguistically dense verve. Under Flag is the first of many poetry collections that I always return to when I need to fall in love again with the way language twists and turns on the tongue and how meaning can unfix itself in the trappings of so-called fluencies.

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 3 out of 5]

early myung mi kim is one still wed to titles but still a pulse is here that has a finger on itself. "Prattle displaced." there is distance and she knows it. she roils in its hell. i love her so. "it is this plastic around our heads."

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The combination of frank language, silences, and deliberately unusual word choices make for a heavy rumination on war, loss of self and country, and grief over them all.

[a l n · Rating 4 out of 5]

bears the fragmented alienation and textural plenitude of, say, dictee with a compressed ear, tracing between almost aleatoric vignettes and sounds

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find Myung Mi Kim's Under Flag quite difficult to understand. To put it bluntly, I can't wangle a meaning out! Perhaps my biggest problem understanding the text stems from Kim's frequent use of sentence fragments, Korean that has been spelled out phonetically in English characters (but lacking an English translation), and what I consider to be strange or spooky diction. As a result, Kim's writing style is notoriously complicated and displeasing to me. And that's not all. I also found the wordplay distracting. Just when a point is about to be made, a string of similar sounding words overwhelm the logic of the line. For no particular reason. Upsetting. I'll try again next year.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

How did anything happen?
How does anything happen?
Many things happened.

[ryo narasaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

same as commons.