What do you think?
Rate this book
Penury
In Penury, Myung Mi Kim probes sanctioned norms of cognition by breaking communication into its most discrete components. With these irruptions and suspensions, she writes into extremes of forced loss, violence, and impoverishment. Exposing latent relations in sound and sense, Kim proposes how new ethical awareness can be encountered where the word and its meaning/s are formed. Here, language is not offered as transparent communication of ideas, but as testament to and disruption of oppressive dominant concepts and cultural practices. "Penury" means poverty, but in this text's radical relation to lack, we hear the most elemental and active forms of change.
- GenresPoetryAsian American
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
5 people are currently reading
130 people want to read
About the author
Myung Mi Kim
13 books42 followersMyung 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Read
August 17, 2009spare, biting, so full of air I breathe deeply, grateful for each precisely placed word and force behind it
Read
June 29, 2010ugh language poetry
May 11, 2025
The sparse poetry of Myung Mi Kim feels like treasure. Like desert wind blowing away just enough sand to reveal separate protrusions of a hidden vast whole. Postmodernism at its finest. I felt at play in the ruins of decaying language. Absolutely brilliant.
May 12, 2023
[Radiant falcon]
Radiant falcon
Scattering acacias
The recitation of acacias
A grove of riverbeds
Residence of years' repose
Patience aids such
A bank of wide hands
Tender petition
Horizon slope, a hoop(ed) light
A fragrant sight beheld beholds
Where in this, further dwelt
Abide
Nestled close
Civil bound
(p111)
Radiant falcon
Scattering acacias
The recitation of acacias
A grove of riverbeds
Residence of years' repose
Patience aids such
A bank of wide hands
Tender petition
Horizon slope, a hoop(ed) light
A fragrant sight beheld beholds
Where in this, further dwelt
Abide
Nestled close
Civil bound
(p111)
February 29, 2020
this book..................................................................................... insane
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 1, 2021
Though I appreciate the language/diction, (shaking up of) form and structure, syntax, I struggled to connect with the meaning of this work/realize the latent genius. I’m missing something, is the feeling I left with.
November 20, 2022
A metal poem ringing all its density.
December 30, 2020
I keep coming back to this collection and loving it even more.
May 26, 2020
Again, this is brilliant poetry and Myung Mi Kim is a great poet. However, the poetry is far more sparse than Commons, which I think resonated with me more. I'm not sure if I really loved it...but I appreciated it, so 3 stars it is.
July 24, 2012
http://tsky-reviews.blogspot.co.nz/20...
Myung Mi Kim’s Penury, like much of her previous work, centres as much, if not more, on silence and the not-said. There is a poverty of language, which is worn with miss-use, like the book on the cover, the pages of which have been torn from their binding, leaving just the boards. Beckett’s Malone says “there is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle”. Yes, yet suspicion of their emptiness comes creeping in, and when they have been the tools of violence, one has difficulty forgetting Celan’s “one hundred years of death-bringing speech”.
As with Celan, Kim writes with an obsessive precision that at times verges on the violent. The silence of the copious white space is broken by speech that is quiet, yet also loud. At this limit of language the word is stretched to its breaking point.
mp
lm
ks
nc
lk
lp
nh
gy
td
nc
you speak English so well transcript (29)
Kim manifests a paratactic stutter that crystallises, then falls away in humility at language’s inadequacy, an awareness of the lie of omission in every speech-act, of narrative in the face of the vast, heterogeneous sprawl that is humanity’s shared experience. Sometimes there is unspeakable horror, sometimes unutterable beauty. That one can come from the other seems in itself unconscionable, as with the invocation of silence and violent censorship in the cover image, itself cast aesthetically, and with a calm beauty.
It is these contradictory states of muteness or glottal penury and strange beauty that Kim is, against all odds, able to conjure. In a way Kim‘s work is similar to Susan Howe’s tracts of settlement, wilderness and violence. However there is much difference; there is no ghost-of-a-story, or if there once was, it has since been erased. Kim’s language breaks on the point of articulation, falling away:
|| salute
to brethren | red
wash
ret ||
clear burn (8)
As with her previous books, Penury engages with violence and injustice, and the seeming impossibility of action in the face of their vastness, on the level of language – the manifestation of the difficulty of saying becomes the one driving imperative, to the point where either there is no text, only slashes (a wicked pun indeed, 104), or text printed over text (90). While some may take issue with opacity, this is not game-playing, and for those who look there is deep beauty in the seeming turmoil. Penury does what poetry should – it says that which cannot be said any other way, yet which needs saying with a driving urgency.
Myung Mi Kim’s Penury, like much of her previous work, centres as much, if not more, on silence and the not-said. There is a poverty of language, which is worn with miss-use, like the book on the cover, the pages of which have been torn from their binding, leaving just the boards. Beckett’s Malone says “there is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle”. Yes, yet suspicion of their emptiness comes creeping in, and when they have been the tools of violence, one has difficulty forgetting Celan’s “one hundred years of death-bringing speech”.
As with Celan, Kim writes with an obsessive precision that at times verges on the violent. The silence of the copious white space is broken by speech that is quiet, yet also loud. At this limit of language the word is stretched to its breaking point.
mp
lm
ks
nc
lk
lp
nh
gy
td
nc
you speak English so well transcript (29)
Kim manifests a paratactic stutter that crystallises, then falls away in humility at language’s inadequacy, an awareness of the lie of omission in every speech-act, of narrative in the face of the vast, heterogeneous sprawl that is humanity’s shared experience. Sometimes there is unspeakable horror, sometimes unutterable beauty. That one can come from the other seems in itself unconscionable, as with the invocation of silence and violent censorship in the cover image, itself cast aesthetically, and with a calm beauty.
It is these contradictory states of muteness or glottal penury and strange beauty that Kim is, against all odds, able to conjure. In a way Kim‘s work is similar to Susan Howe’s tracts of settlement, wilderness and violence. However there is much difference; there is no ghost-of-a-story, or if there once was, it has since been erased. Kim’s language breaks on the point of articulation, falling away:
|| salute
to brethren | red
wash
ret ||
clear burn (8)
As with her previous books, Penury engages with violence and injustice, and the seeming impossibility of action in the face of their vastness, on the level of language – the manifestation of the difficulty of saying becomes the one driving imperative, to the point where either there is no text, only slashes (a wicked pun indeed, 104), or text printed over text (90). While some may take issue with opacity, this is not game-playing, and for those who look there is deep beauty in the seeming turmoil. Penury does what poetry should – it says that which cannot be said any other way, yet which needs saying with a driving urgency.
October 22, 2009
I really liked these-- one of those books of poems where there's more white space than text, and sometimes the white swallows the words. Here, though, Kim's skeltal language more than holds its own against the entropy and drift of all that page.
Something else like this, I felt it was the syntax that allowed me to find something in the poems. With this collection, it's more the idea of excision, the sense that what I'm reading is what's left from a series of rather disturbing manuals on conduct in war-time. Or something like that-- it's much less a feeling that there's a master-plan here and much more a feeling of a decentralized authority. Which can be kind of scary, but in this collection, that fear is well-directed, against those anonymous agencies that can kind of freak us out.... surprisingly grounded and durable poems.
Something else like this, I felt it was the syntax that allowed me to find something in the poems. With this collection, it's more the idea of excision, the sense that what I'm reading is what's left from a series of rather disturbing manuals on conduct in war-time. Or something like that-- it's much less a feeling that there's a master-plan here and much more a feeling of a decentralized authority. Which can be kind of scary, but in this collection, that fear is well-directed, against those anonymous agencies that can kind of freak us out.... surprisingly grounded and durable poems.
May 22, 2011
Beautiful take on capitalism and poetic form. The book is aesthetically pleasing and influenced my poetry when I read it.
April 24, 2017
Myung Mi Kim's book is intimidatingly sparse. Her stanza's are small and often pages only featured four lines and blank pages between stanzas and poems. The text contains compelling juxtapositions and some truly beautiful language. However, I had a hard time finding a rhythm and finding connective tissue throughout many of the poems. It was at times obtuse but I had an overall positive impression of the work.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews