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Cold Candies

Selected Poems of Lee Young-ju

trans. Jae Kim

Oct 01, 2021 / Paperback / 96p. / Poetry / ISBN 1939568404 / Black Ocean

Cold Candies encapsulate the saccharine strangeness of a woman's life. Fragments of narratives about girls, dolls, sisters, mothers, men, lizards, the moon, and pillows are brought together into otherworldly images that are devastating, yet familiar. Lee Young-ju is one of South Korea's most original minds, and this collection, curated and translated by National Endowment of Arts Fellow Jae Kim, features a selection from her extraordinary body of work. These prose poems are often self-portraits, and together, they are as much an account of her life as it is an attempt to understand it. Pulling out threads from her past, she examines its traumas and tragedies and unravels a haunting dreamscape of intimacy and kinship.








PRAISE





Writer and translator Jae Kim beautifully and superbly channels Lee Young-ju’s surreal, dream-like prose poems. Each poem, each fragment is like a cinematic seamless shot, panning across the familiar yet defamiliarized landscapes — the fabled and fated — of girls, sisters, mothers, and grandmothers. Lee’s exploration of feminine subjectivity and terrain is another innovative Korean feminist poetry to emerge within the past decade.  
— Don Mee Choi





Can we enter the grave under a single name, the name of the one who sings most beautifully? What a tonic pleasure to traverse the distinctive topology of Lee Young-ju's poetic world, in which blanket and pillow, grave and heaven form an impossibly continuous shoreline on a wondrously inverting scale. Here the intimate is cosmic, and to trust, to address as sister, is to enter into a cloud of dynamic mutuality, a woolly warmth flecked with threat. In the basement, darkness is round, while, on the beach, to rot is to become the sky itself. Jae Kim's English translations render Lee's sightlines with a deft sonority and offer a radically responsive sense of the possible: dyed blue and dyed blue and made bluer.
— Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne





Lee Young-ju’s poem’s concision defies the larger narrative it suggests where bodies and houses are rearranged and disfigured, perhaps violently, and Jae Kim’s translation captures the poem’s grotesque yet tender overtones with remarkable precision.
— Mónica de la Torre 
on "Roommate, Woman"





If Salvador Dali had written poetry, it might be like this, full of trompes d’oeils, flippant about the rules, running through a place that is familiar but not like anything you’re ever seen.
— Ann Anderson Evans for Lit Pub





These poems call to mind the plays of Samuel Beckett, paintings by Francis Bacon, and films such as Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, but in the end they realize a highly original horror, one that allows the reader to observe their own anxiety as separate, an entity apart, like the various elements in Young-ju’s elaborate scenes. 
— Ryo Yamaguchi for Poetry Magazine

In “Roommate, Woman,” Lee also positions the reader “face-down” on the floor of a tavern, often moving our eyes up and away from the floor. It’s as if we’re underwater, but we can’t look away from the moon. It’s as if we’re moving up and down at the same time. Up the girl’s ladder-like bone, up like the smoke coming from the soles of a barefoot child. But what’s that under your foot?
— Paul Cunningham for Action Books

Cold Candies is a study of the human mind, with all its surreal associations and unexcavated corners. The experience of reading is like watching the machinations of someone’s brain:  witnessing the desire for destruction delicately entangled with the desire for pleasure, … finding oneself suspended in an unfamiliar zone, and the disorientation is pleasurable.
— Madeleine Cravens for Ploughshares