Glory Hole

by Kim Hyun, Suhyun J. Ahn (Translator), Archana Madhavan (Translator)

A ground-breaking new collection of queer poetry from a leading contemporary Korean poet.
 
Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection. Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim’s fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making. His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures. They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithetical to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns. After all, like LGBTQ+ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence. Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyun’s form. Glory Hole invites readers into a very queer world.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT

264 pages, Paperback

Published June 10, 2022

About the author

South Korean author Kim Hyun has published four volumes of poems and six essay collections, and he has co-authored several queer novels and anthologies.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

To call Glory Hole ground-breaking is an understatement. Korean poet Kim Hyun (김현) employs a style all his own - a hybrid of poetry and prose, with paragraphs, dialogue, and footnotes. I read this as a deconstruction of the poetic form, with a particular Korean flavor. The aim of this work is not just deconstruction - it is reconstruction into something new, something thoroughly queer. The result is provocative in the extreme: theme and subject that are graphically queer, performed through a medium that is itself opposed to prevailing heteronormative forms. I hope this work, translated from the original 『글로리홀』 by Shuhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan, reaches a larger audience.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm)]

"The desire to evade external constraints reflects a queer aesthetic that breaks the bounds of the sexual and invades the textual. Whether it be the uncertainty of genre or the slippage between forms in poems that look, and often even read, as prose, Kim queers conventional “straight” understanding and skews the lens to look through the (glory) hole in the wall and discover a new orientation to the world. His transgressive style is paradoxically predicated on its unpredictability."

My review is out on Asymptote: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...

[Indigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very strange, cryptic and even indecipherable book; these are all the things that make it so profound and worthwhile. When you read it, really read it (I had to go back and read each poem at least twice), you’ll realize you are making gay meaning—or rather, queer meaning—from narratives and characters that are not necessarily linear and that don’t strive to meet a certain expectation of clarity. This is what it’s like to feel sorrow, loss, love, etc.—it’s queer! And the most fascinating thing about this to me is while I’m now counting it as one of the most fascinating pieces of literature I’ve ever read, I found it completely by chance in a bookstore out of town.

[Gi :) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glory Hole by Kim Hyeon is a groundbreaking Korean queer poetry collection that I found to be both bizarre and fascinating. The poems feature characters such as gay teenagers, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and more, exploring themes of love, desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. What really struck me about this collection was its deliberate rejection of traditional poetic conventions. Instead of elegant imagery and clear language, Kim's poems are often incoherent, using unidiomatic expressions, puns, and fictive references. As the translators note, the goal was to emulate the discomfort Korean readers feel when reading Kim's poetry.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is "Inhumane." The poem tells the story of a human who transforms into a fish, using strange and almost incomprehensible language to describe the transformation. The imagery is haunting and surreal, and I found myself re-reading the poem several times to fully grasp its meaning.

Overall, Glory Hole is a challenging and unconventional collection that I enjoyed reading. It invites readers into a world that is both strange and familiar, and I appreciate the translator's commitment to preserving the discomfort that Kim's poetry can evoke in readers.

[Gareth Schweitzer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of poems and prose poems that are literary, intellectual and contemporary and playful in their use of footnotes.
The clean minimal structures and cool direct prose makes them easier to digest as they really are quite surreal, strange and absurd.

The downside of this is I am often perplexed and bewildered, left with an “interesting, but so what” reaction as their content is quite alienating and obtuse. It reminds me of reading Burroughs or Acker.

There is an essay at the end which explains how the poems work. This is illuminating but academic and suggests you really need to get the author’s references to understand the “poems” fully.

I don’t find these prose poems particularly LGBTQ+ oriented but am interested that this work is being hailed as a distinctive queer Korean voice…again addressed in the essay at the end.

I do wish they were a bit sexier though.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

I find prose poetry my least favorite and this collection felt too obscure for me to connect to. I also feel that poetry should not have footnotes. Heavily queer and full of futuristic and fantasy along with social commentary I feel that I wanted to like the poems but could not get past the structure.

[violette d’urso · Rating 4 out of 5]

First Korean queer poetry collection

[Gabriela Oprea · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5