The Bounty

by Myung Mi Kim

Poetry. Asian American Studies. THE BOUNTY, by the Korean American Kim, has become an acknowledged classic of Asian American literature of the past decade. More than that, it is one of the best books of poetry of the 1990s, now in a new edition to bring it into the next millenium.

"The tesserae Myung Mi Kim so remarkably fashions here come gradually to form an articulate and coherent pattern, but a pattern in constant process of renewal and reorganization."—Michael Palmer

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1996

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

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Bounty is one of the great openings in American Poetry of the 1990s and moving forward. It is a work moving from one continent to another, one language practice to another, and embraces an enlarging of American space as well as a questioning of that space. While practicing a poetics of the field that calls to mind the best work of Charles Olson, it is a work of both local and global significance, and will send you on a voyage of your own. One of the best books of poetry I know, from any period.