DMZ Colony

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Korean translator Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony didn't cohere for me. The Orphan Series is a devastating account of the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre and Ahn Hak-Sop's testimony from his home in the Civilian Control Zone on the South Korean side of the DMZ is nothing short of harrowing. But then the poetic tricks of Mirror Words and whatever is happening in The Apparatus is just lost to me. The literary journals I seek out to decipher the words on the page only frustrate me more, drenched in oblique language, literary folderol and referencing an artistic tradition I'm unfamiliar with. It's like I'm missing the key that brings it all into focus, the rosetta stone that brings the language into clear focus. I don't doubt it's art - but it flew well past me.