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Phantom Pain Wings
Winged ventriloquy―a powerful new poetry collection channeling the language of birds by South Korea’s most innovative contemporary writer An iconic figure in the emergence of feminist poetry in South Korea and now internationally renowned, Kim Hyesoon pushes the poetic envelope into the farthest reaches of the lyric universe. In her new collection, Kim depicts the memory of war trauma and the collective grief of parting through what she calls an “I-do-bird-sequence,” where “Bird-human is the ‘I.’” Her remarkable essay “Bird Rider” “I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language. Bird language that flies to places I’ve never been.” What unfolds is an epic sequence of bird ventriloquy exploring the relentless physical and existential struggles against power and gendered violence in “the eternal void of grief” (Victoria Chang, The New York Times Magazine ). Through intensely rhythmic lines marked by visual puns and words that crash together and then fly away as one, Kim mixes traditional folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, the legacies of Rimbaud and Yi Sang, a film by Agnes Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones, a princess trapped in a hospital, and more. A simultaneity of voices and identities rises and falls, existing and exiting on their delayed wings of pain.
208 pages, Paperback
Published May 2, 2023
44 people are currently reading
723 people want to read
About the author
Kim Hyesoon
27 books83 followersBorn 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
January 28, 2024
rating translated poetry is tough because i think a lot can get lost in translation, but it's not the translator's fault. it's me and my pea-sized brain's fault for not really understanding a lot of these poems. lemme just learn Korean real quick. also i liked the essay at the end and helped understand where the poetry stemmed from
July 2, 2023
I'll figure out how to rate this later, but this was such a tough collection of poems to get through. Really have to hand it to Choi for doing everything she can to remain faithful to the original while still trying to make it make sense to an audience reading in English.
February 10, 2024
This poetry book is incredible.
Did I know what was going on in basically any given poem? Absolutely not.
But the writing was gorgeous. When I could break through the meaning, I was completely gutted. And this has some of the most poignant lines I'd ever read.
Wow. Just, yeah. Wow. More, please.
Did I know what was going on in basically any given poem? Absolutely not.
But the writing was gorgeous. When I could break through the meaning, I was completely gutted. And this has some of the most poignant lines I'd ever read.
Wow. Just, yeah. Wow. More, please.
March 24, 2026
How can poetry at the same time contain and release so much pain? “Phantom Pain Wings” (날개 환상통) is my second experience with poetry by Kim Hyesoon and again it feels like stepping into a new, yet already familiar realm. A realm, in which words take different meanings from those established ones, women transform into birds and birds transform into people, often dead ones. A realm, in which past and present exist simultaneously and haunt.
Kim’s poetry is not to be understood with intellect. And definitely not to comfort anyone. As she writes in an essay at the end of the book: “(…) I become even more frightened when I’m asked who my poetry comforts. Therefore, when someone even utters the word comfort, I want to run and hide. I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing. (…) literary work merely constructs an afterimage or alternative symmetrical pattern of the event that occurs.”
Pain that Kim embraces so courageously and generously, so often related to women’s experiences, is visceral and raw. It appears out of nowhere and sweeps me like a tsunami. It pierces my heart without warning and clips my wings, to use the bird’s body’s analogy. Sometimes I read several poems one after another, sometimes just one but a few times in a row. My words cannot give justice to the feelings I experience when confronted with certain images or a certain rhythm. “Phantom Pain Wings” makes me ask questions. Two, in particular, reverberate through the entire book: Is it even relevant to name emotions if complex images stir something in me but that something doesn’t have a name? Can nameless experiences be more powerful than those we can put into words?
Good poetry for me is such that makes me feel humbled and that makes my brain work hard. One that makes me richer after reading it. Kim Hyesoon is a genius and it moves me that we may look at the same moon and live on Earth as ourselves at the same time.
Kim’s poetry is not to be understood with intellect. And definitely not to comfort anyone. As she writes in an essay at the end of the book: “(…) I become even more frightened when I’m asked who my poetry comforts. Therefore, when someone even utters the word comfort, I want to run and hide. I don’t think I’ve ever comforted anyone with my writing. (…) literary work merely constructs an afterimage or alternative symmetrical pattern of the event that occurs.”
Pain that Kim embraces so courageously and generously, so often related to women’s experiences, is visceral and raw. It appears out of nowhere and sweeps me like a tsunami. It pierces my heart without warning and clips my wings, to use the bird’s body’s analogy. Sometimes I read several poems one after another, sometimes just one but a few times in a row. My words cannot give justice to the feelings I experience when confronted with certain images or a certain rhythm. “Phantom Pain Wings” makes me ask questions. Two, in particular, reverberate through the entire book: Is it even relevant to name emotions if complex images stir something in me but that something doesn’t have a name? Can nameless experiences be more powerful than those we can put into words?
Good poetry for me is such that makes me feel humbled and that makes my brain work hard. One that makes me richer after reading it. Kim Hyesoon is a genius and it moves me that we may look at the same moon and live on Earth as ourselves at the same time.
March 13, 2024
Much like Hyesoon's title that prefigures the poem inside, these are breathlessly ethereal poems that grasp the reader roughly. Images that are violent and beautiful slide in and out of the mind as each verse soars higher and higher--to only plummet.
April 27, 2025
Hyesoon explains in her essay that poetry is a self awareness to how we depict our traumas, grief and parting with our loved ones when they pass. And now the struggle to maintain a tranquility and to fly away as one with so much pain inside.
If you believe in “bird ventriloquist” through the loss of our loved ones then let your wings soar with this collection clasped under your beak.
Favorites:
Phantom Pain Wings
Floor Is Not a Floor
10 Centimeters
Korean Zen
Again, I Need To Ask Poor Yi Sang
More Tender Heart
Pre-Ghost
If you believe in “bird ventriloquist” through the loss of our loved ones then let your wings soar with this collection clasped under your beak.
Favorites:
Phantom Pain Wings
Floor Is Not a Floor
10 Centimeters
Korean Zen
Again, I Need To Ask Poor Yi Sang
More Tender Heart
Pre-Ghost
July 12, 2025
i found this book in a little free library and had no expectations but it’s…. maybe now one of my favorite poetry collections?? if i thought too hard about any of the words i’d have no idea what was going on, but if i let them wash over me in a sort of dream logic, i’d be like… oh this is exactly what grief feels like. so weird so wonderful so its own. i wish i could read these poems in their original language!
October 3, 2025
i unfortunately really did not like this at all
January 30, 2026
I WAS READING somewhere recently about South Korea's low fertility rate, which has been <1 for a few years now (replacement level is 2.1). The writer's take was that the education level of South Korean women has risen dramatically in recent generations, but the society's patriarchal culture has scarcely budged, with the consequence that younger South Korean women are intentionally avoiding marriage and motherhood, even boyfriends and sex (you can read up on the "4B movement" in a good many places).
Reading Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian and this collection by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon has made me a well-wisher to the 4B movement. The male entitlement on view in both books induces shudders. HUNTR/X wouldn't stand for it, I'm sure (come to think of it, they don't have boyfriends, do they?).
The collection's (English) title refers to the pain someone who has had (for example) a leg amputated can still experience in the now-absent leg, although the missing limbs in this instance are wings, as though Kim were a bird who had lost her wings. The poems seem to be working out this loss or working towards recovering birdness while at the same time grieving another loss, the deaths of her parents. As Kim writes in the essay that New Directions have appended to this translation, "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language."
Being a bird, for Kim, seems to involve getting up and out, leaving the cage, breaking into a new dimension (that I was also reading Cartarescu's Solenoid as I was reading her poems might have reinforced this theme for me). For instance:
I fly then stop
I fly then chirp
Inside my made-up world, I can go very far
Not a song
Not an echo
but a faraway place where there's only freedom
I'm bird, bird flying in that place
That is not exactly a typical passage, though, as Kim is usually wilder, stranger, more surreal. Try this:
You died faraway and returned
Daddy, like an owl,
you perch on the dining table
and see night during the day
night during the night
Daddy, when you're too embarrassed,
you swear every other word
like I swear at myself in the third person
Everybody says it's my fault
and not my brother's fault
Daddy, your flesh-colored head
spews white hair like a white trumpet
I wondered a bit at translator Don Mee Choi's decision to go with "Daddy" throughout the book, since the word will certainly remind English-speaking readers of Sylvia Plath, but it turned out Kim is conversant with Plath (see p. 127), and the intertextual echo came to seem, as in the quoted passage, uncannily resonant.
Kim may not attract an audience the size of those for K-Pop, or South Korean film, or even Han Kang's novels, but if you were wondering whether South Korea's cultural explosion is also happening in poetry, the answer is yes.
Reading Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian and this collection by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon has made me a well-wisher to the 4B movement. The male entitlement on view in both books induces shudders. HUNTR/X wouldn't stand for it, I'm sure (come to think of it, they don't have boyfriends, do they?).
The collection's (English) title refers to the pain someone who has had (for example) a leg amputated can still experience in the now-absent leg, although the missing limbs in this instance are wings, as though Kim were a bird who had lost her wings. The poems seem to be working out this loss or working towards recovering birdness while at the same time grieving another loss, the deaths of her parents. As Kim writes in the essay that New Directions have appended to this translation, "I came to write Phantom Pain Wings after Daddy passed away. I called out for birds endlessly. I wanted to become a translator of bird language."
Being a bird, for Kim, seems to involve getting up and out, leaving the cage, breaking into a new dimension (that I was also reading Cartarescu's Solenoid as I was reading her poems might have reinforced this theme for me). For instance:
I fly then stop
I fly then chirp
Inside my made-up world, I can go very far
Not a song
Not an echo
but a faraway place where there's only freedom
I'm bird, bird flying in that place
That is not exactly a typical passage, though, as Kim is usually wilder, stranger, more surreal. Try this:
You died faraway and returned
Daddy, like an owl,
you perch on the dining table
and see night during the day
night during the night
Daddy, when you're too embarrassed,
you swear every other word
like I swear at myself in the third person
Everybody says it's my fault
and not my brother's fault
Daddy, your flesh-colored head
spews white hair like a white trumpet
I wondered a bit at translator Don Mee Choi's decision to go with "Daddy" throughout the book, since the word will certainly remind English-speaking readers of Sylvia Plath, but it turned out Kim is conversant with Plath (see p. 127), and the intertextual echo came to seem, as in the quoted passage, uncannily resonant.
Kim may not attract an audience the size of those for K-Pop, or South Korean film, or even Han Kang's novels, but if you were wondering whether South Korea's cultural explosion is also happening in poetry, the answer is yes.
February 20, 2026
a really hallucinatory, dissociative experience of grief, as written-spoken by a woman who is also a bird. bird is not only a method of transformation/fusion/becoming but also a pronoun - once as i was flying across the night sky / your arrow pierced my heart / flutter-flutter-anxiety disorder, spasm disorder / that's how bird became a bird. it feels simplistic to say that the bird is grief (the book is largely about the deaths of poet kim hyesoon's parents) but kim turns that metaphor into something complicated indeed - a meditation on womanhood, being korean, being alive in a world that no longer understands you, where the people who understood you best no longer exist. I wish that she had let the work stand for itself, however; there's an extended essay at the end where the poet kind of (over)explains the metaphor which i thought was super clear. there's also a diary appended written by translator don mee choi, who completed this translation project during covid-19 quarantine. beyond providing a fascinating look into the process of translation, the diary complements the themes of the poems - a glimpse into a writing process colored by a world in isolation and a life irrevocably colored by death pressing in from every corner.
stand out poems include (but there are so many!!): princess naklang, bragging about my dress, not, vanished mommy vanished kitchen, bird sickness, more tender heart, again i need to ask poor yi sang, 10 centimeters, glimmer--you must, phantom pain wings.
stand out poems include (but there are so many!!): princess naklang, bragging about my dress, not, vanished mommy vanished kitchen, bird sickness, more tender heart, again i need to ask poor yi sang, 10 centimeters, glimmer--you must, phantom pain wings.
May 2, 2025
This collection goes through a lot & it can be easy to get lost between the pages, but I found it worth my time. Hyesoon's fascination with birds becomes this spiritual link between her and her late parents, along with the world as she understands it, all in mourning. The whole book is a kind of divination to me. Hyesoon describes poetry as a sort of channelling, a way to make room within herself for something else to enter, which makes sense considering where she was emotionally as she wrote this. It's the kind of collection I'll pick up several times only to still find new things within it.
The translator's notes are tucked quietly at the end of the book, but are just as thoughtful and compelling to read as the collection itself. Don Mee Choi's diary expands on her correspondence with Hyesoon, along with personal reflections as she translates the book in the middle of the pandemic. Choi is a poet in her own right, and her notes do a lot to contextualize Hyesoon's poetry both culturally and linguistically (her wordplay naturally makes the most sense in Korean). Not to be skipped over!
The translator's notes are tucked quietly at the end of the book, but are just as thoughtful and compelling to read as the collection itself. Don Mee Choi's diary expands on her correspondence with Hyesoon, along with personal reflections as she translates the book in the middle of the pandemic. Choi is a poet in her own right, and her notes do a lot to contextualize Hyesoon's poetry both culturally and linguistically (her wordplay naturally makes the most sense in Korean). Not to be skipped over!
Read
August 1, 2023Told in four titled sections that culminate in an essay by Hyesoon, these poems are funny, surreal, and teem with longing. Bird enthusiasts especially, reach for this reflection on making, mourning, sound, and war. An endnotes fanatic, I deeply appreciated the “Translator’s Diary,” drawing hearts in the margins my entire way through. Insights into the process of translating poetry from Korean to English, the weather and bird reports, and dreams and nightmares fascinated me.
from “Recent Poetry Releases to Add to Your Collections in Anticipation of The Sealey Challenge” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/new-poetry-2023/
from “Recent Poetry Releases to Add to Your Collections in Anticipation of The Sealey Challenge” via BOOK RIOT: https://bookriot.com/new-poetry-2023/
April 29, 2025
When I first started reading this, it felt like I was reading the internal process of someone going through a psychotic episode, and I loved it. I recommend first reading the essay in the back to have some context for the poems. I also recommend referencing the translator’s diary as you read through the poems. It’s helpful to hear the translation process and what may have been lost or changed in translation. The poems are powerful and do not shy away from tough topics of grief and suffering. I appreciate the use of metaphors and the use of body horror to mirror the emotional pain and yuckiness of challenging social emotional experiences.
October 19, 2025
I read this for school so it was compulsory for me but I want to say the one star knocked off is just for my own ignorance of Korean history, language, poetics and culture.
The way into this book was difficult for me. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to mentally latch for maybe the first entire half of the book. Eventually I felt convinced by the poet’s voice, that she knew something I didn’t know, and I could be carried along by the strength there alone.
The poet’s essay and translator’s notes at the end were revelatory.
I need to learn more about the world.
The way into this book was difficult for me. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to mentally latch for maybe the first entire half of the book. Eventually I felt convinced by the poet’s voice, that she knew something I didn’t know, and I could be carried along by the strength there alone.
The poet’s essay and translator’s notes at the end were revelatory.
I need to learn more about the world.
April 15, 2025
I just didn’t connect with this at all/maybe this was just a collection better understood in its original language idk translated poetry can be tough. I really appreciated the translators notes at the end though. I found the overuse of the word mommy kinda off putting and I really just don’t like bird imagery so perhaps this is just not my vibe.
Read
March 22, 2024not in a headspace for poetry i guess. this one a bit weird, heavy with symbolisms especially with animals. but pretty relatable with the last part and reading the translator notes really helped a lot.
Read
August 3, 2024Wish I had read the translator's notes/diary before and after, it would have helped with understanding. I liked this, but think a lot got lost in translation (footnotes or the translator's diary being at the beginning would have helped).
October 31, 2023
Extraordinary. Exemplary.
December 22, 2023
I don't think this is bad. It's just not "my kind" of poetry.
What I enjoyed the most was the final essay.
What I enjoyed the most was the final essay.
January 15, 2024
Poems that are both Sylvia Plath AND Ted Hughes in sensibility but uniquely their own at the same time. Compelling.
April 10, 2024
Read this poetry in translation. Read more poetry in translation. Read more poetry.
February 25, 2025
A bird paranoia of birding rhythms and farewells.
March 16, 2025
Translation felt off. Probably better in original language.
March 22, 2025
despair invents ventriloquy
July 25, 2025
Hyesoon's writing isn't comforting - she tests the limits of literature to express human vulnerability. Her works are perceptive and powerful because of her unsentimental approach.
Read
November 10, 2025need a do-over of this one in Korean…
December 10, 2025
I’ll admit I don’t think I was ready for some of these poems, but I can acknowledge Kim Hyesoon’s incredible mind and writing. Her poetry feels so raw and unique to me, and I want to understand her.
January 7, 2025
For the most part I didn’t find this as confusing as many of the other reviewers here seemed to—but I am also Korean and Korean is technically my first language so I guess I have more context for this sort of thing. I was a little lost towards the end, but I didn’t find that to impede my enjoyment of the text at all. Translating this seems like it was crazy. The original text seems like it was crazy. I thought it was wonderful. Made me want to brush up on my Korean specifically so I could read this in the original text.
December 12, 2023
I literally didn't understand 98% of this.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews