Ossia

In this extraordinary, passionate debut poetry collection, Jimin Seo takes up a material we think we recognize – language – and transforms it through permutation, history, and translation into a lyrical and alien terrain. Seo takes up both Korean and English, drawing them across multiple experiences of relation – none of them equivalence. Translation and re-translation triangulate to form the ghostly third other which defines every relationship of two. Fragmentation, riff, homophony, and analogy sprawl like cuttings from a plant, yielding poems that grow in defiant new directions. This is a book calling to a mother, a teacher, lovers, and ultimately a self whose elements materialise through language, even as the speaker laments what language cannot be or hold.