Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?

Author: Kim Eon Hee

Publisher: Noemi Press (2019)

Kim Eon Hee was born in 1953 in Jinju, Gyeongsang Province. She is the author of five volumes of poetry. Her first collection Modern Ars Poetica was published in 1989. Followed by, Trunk, The Girl who Sleeps Under a Withering Cherry Tree, Unexpected Response, and her latest from 2016 The Man I Miss. First published in 2011, Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days?, is her fourth poetry collection, and the first of her books’ to be translated into English.

"Sung Gi Kim’s and Eunsong Kim’s deft, nuanced, and unmannered translations of Kim Eon Hee’s poems introduce a genuinely exciting poet to the English-speaking world, one whose work reveals for us the limitations of our conceptions of what poetry is and the colonial legacies that structure our basic concepts of poetry, such as the gendered and raced expectations of the poetic speaker and of what counts as 'experimental' writing. Kim’s poetry, as the translators write, is 'unafraid of graphic disappointment or the pits': she brilliantly violates our idea of what is acceptable for an Asian female poet to say out loud. The backdrop to Kim’s playful 'absurdist' poetry is the neoliberal and neocolonial context of contemporary South Korea and its relationship to the United States, the two countries in the Kims’ words, 'economic and political collaborators.' They rightly describe Kim Eon Hee’s poetry as 'an unexpectedly politicized space,' as, equally so, are their translations—and, indeed, all poetry and all translations." 

— Dorothy Wang