To Regard a Wave

Author: Sora Y. Han

Publisher: selva oscura press (2024)

Part sketchbook, part divination, To Regard a Wave invites us into a feminine shamanistic, mudang, journey through the underworlds of language imposition. Deranged by a devotion to be in something like a wave-dimension of language, Han's homophonic play across these poems tell a story of how exiled revolutionary desires live on in the weave of untranslatable and unlikely histories of loss and unbelonging. Her graphic chants transmit the experience of Korean freedom struggle as she deciphers the haunt of hangul across the many Englishes of anti-colonial thought. With each turn of the letter ㅁ, the shapes and sounds of the Korean alphabet mark the everyday horrors and beauty of life in the midst of wars upon war. Here, in a dreamscape created with the associative richness of hanja pictograms, fugitive desire and the desire for fugitivity disappear, one into the other, in search of new open fields.