Kim Hyesoon was born in Uljin County, North Gyeongsang Province. She was raised by her grandmother and had tuberculous pleurisy as a child.[2] She received her Ph.D. in Korean literature from Konkuk University[3] and began her career as a poet in 1979 with the publication of the poem "Dead body Smoking a Cigarette" along with four other of her poems in the literary magazine Literature and Intellect (Munhak-kwa Jiseong).[4] Kim Hyesoon is Poet, essayist, and critic. She is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She has published fourteen poetry books and four books on poetics. Kim is an most important contemporary poet in South Korea, and she lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Kim was in the forefront of women published in Literature and Intellect.[5][6]
Work
Kim started to receive critical acclaim in the 1990s. Her own belief is that her work was recognized at that time in no small part because the 1990s in South Korea were noted for a generally strong wave of women poets and women's poetry.
Kim Hyesoon was named the T.S. Eliot Memorial Reader at Harvard University Library (2023).[10]
Her poetry collecton Phantompain Wings was named poetry book of the year(2023) by the New York Times and Washington Post, The Poetry Society(U.K),[11] among others.[12]
Her poems have been translated into many languages (Swedish, French, German, Polish, Persian, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Danish, etc).
Kim's profile appeared in The New Yorker,[13] and her poems have appeared in The New York Times,[14]Guernica,[15]The Paris Review, The Nation,[16]The Poetry Foundation,[17]The Boston Review,[18]The European Review[19] poetryinternationalweb,[20] and Tricycle.[21]
Kim's poetry collections include: From another star (1981), Father's scarecrow (1985), The Hell of a certain star (1987), Our negative picture (1991), My Upanishad, Seoul (1994), A Poor Love Machine (1997), To the Calendar Factory Manager (2000), A Glass of Red Mirror (2004), Your First (2008), Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2011), Blossom, Pig (2016), Autobiography of Death (2016), and Wing Phantom Pain (2019). After Earth Dies, who will Moon Orbit?(2022).
Kim has participated in readings at poetry festivals all over the world.
Kim Hyesoon's poetry was used for Jenny Holzer's exhibit at the Korean National Museum of Modern contemporary Art.[22]
Kim's skill as a writer resides in her facility at combining poetic images with experimental language while simultaneously grounding her work in ‘feminine writing’ drawn from female experiences. Her language is violent and linguistically agile, appropriate for her topics which often center on death and/or injustice. A landmark feminist poet and critic in her native South Korea, Kim Hyesoon's surreal, dagger-sharp poetry has spread from hemisphere to hemisphere in the past ten years, her works translated to Chinese, Swedish, English, French, German, Dutch, Danish and beyond. Kim Hyesoon raises a glass to the reader in the form of a series of riddles, poems conjuring the you inside the me, the night inside the day, the outside inside the inside, the ocean inside the tear. Kim's radical, paradoxical intimacies entail sites of pain as well as wonder, opening onto impossible—which is to say, visionary—vistas. Again and again, in these poems as across her career, Kim unlocks a horizon inside the vanishing point.
The birdlike Kim weaves a pattern of poems, so strangely compelling and curious, and utterly unlike anything I had heard before. —Sasha Dugdale
