OSSIA

The dead draw the living toward new language in Jimin Seo’s extraordinary debut poetry collection, OSSIA. Writing across Korean and English in poems that span a breadth of forms, Seo renders an entirely original map of the voice in its shifting address to a range of ghostly figures: his mother; old lovers; his late friend and mentor, the legendary poet-translator Richard Howard. Taking the cleaving mechanism of translation as a point of departure (“ossia” means “or rather” and is used to indicate an alternative way of playing a passage in a musical score), Seo’s intricate, polyvocal poems are rich with grief and radiant with the vivid charisma of specific people, specific love. What regions does the lyric mode chart that the dispassionate account cannot? How do present conditions of longing shape perceptions of the past? OSSIA surfaces the unsayable terrain of history, holding us in the complex coordinates of eros and education, origin and loss.