An excerpt from

P R I N C E S S _ A B A N D O N E D
Essays by Kim Hyesoon • Translated by Don Mee Choi • February 2012 • $3
Design by Eric Butler

from "Poetry of Hearing (--what is femininity?)"

The performer cannot develop her body and soul, her life as the performer of the Abandoned, without making contact with ghosts. The performer exists as a twin-like being, who is intertwined with death, the death she was able to name through her active participation in it, and she uses this ability to visit back and forth with the death everyone harbors. She attains her ability as a performer of death through her own life's suffering, the naming of her suffering which is like death . . . making contact with her own spirit allows her to communicate with other spirits through the bodies of the others and enables her to guide the spirits of the dead to a safe place (?) in the netherworld at the request of her regulars.

Kim, Hyesoon is one of the most important contemporary poets in South Korea. She lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Kim began publishing in 1979 and began receiving critical recognition in the late 1990s. She writes in the context of Korea's highly patriarchal society, a nation that is still under neocolonial rule by the U.S.

Choi, Don Mee is the author of The Morning News is Exciting (Action Books, 2010). She translated When the Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish, 2005), as well as other books by Kim Hyesoon. She lives and works in Seattle.

Get both Princess Abandoned and Hyesoon's other Tinfish publication When the Plug Gets Unplugged (also translated by Don Mee Kim) for $10. Follow the purchase link to take advantage of this two-for-one deal.