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Mirror Nation
Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award–winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020). Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.
152 pages, Paperback
Published April 2, 2024
About the author
Don Mee Choi
25 books88 followersBorn in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 13, 2024
3.5
Probably my favorite Don Mee Choi work thus far. She seems to improve as the trilogy goes on. Her poetry actively seeks, for the majority of these pages, to evade poetic turns: These are essays reenvisioned as prose poems held together until the language, in a very Jelinek-esque sense, cannot hold, and then a far more overt, unpindownable political lyric explodes onto the page, trilingual and derelict of immediate meaning. What she is so great at is using her multimedia anti-form to expose a neocolonial (KORUS) web that doesn't just linger into today but is very much active, an activity that rumbles within Don Mee Choi's being as she considers her emigrant history while discussing her father's photography, the Gwangju Massacre, her subjectivity in Germany, her links to English and the American military machine that has fractured her. But it doesn't read like an outcry or a work on identity in the typical sense. The rage simmers and spits and boils and bubbles through a profound intellect expressed in a manner no one else (that I know of) seems to share in contemporary American poetry. Her Yi Sang-like "공=o=5=0=zero" and her final poem and the recurrence of swans mostly elude me.
Probably my favorite Don Mee Choi work thus far. She seems to improve as the trilogy goes on. Her poetry actively seeks, for the majority of these pages, to evade poetic turns: These are essays reenvisioned as prose poems held together until the language, in a very Jelinek-esque sense, cannot hold, and then a far more overt, unpindownable political lyric explodes onto the page, trilingual and derelict of immediate meaning. What she is so great at is using her multimedia anti-form to expose a neocolonial (KORUS) web that doesn't just linger into today but is very much active, an activity that rumbles within Don Mee Choi's being as she considers her emigrant history while discussing her father's photography, the Gwangju Massacre, her subjectivity in Germany, her links to English and the American military machine that has fractured her. But it doesn't read like an outcry or a work on identity in the typical sense. The rage simmers and spits and boils and bubbles through a profound intellect expressed in a manner no one else (that I know of) seems to share in contemporary American poetry. Her Yi Sang-like "공=o=5=0=zero" and her final poem and the recurrence of swans mostly elude me.
September 2, 2024
This felt sharper, more focused than her previous work! Tighter image bank - bridges, angels, clocks, marks - i thought the stuff on marks connecting across time and place was amazing, the 0 of an angels halo to a clock to a flag. I liked how focused it was on the gwangju massacre too. I think it could’ve been tighter, I don’t like her tendency of stringing quotes together and the stuff on swans and letters felt extraneous, but there is also something fascinating and haunting about her messy swirl of fury and grief… I wonder why she kept the beautiful stuff on imagining the future in the notes section??
October 5, 2024
This is brilliant. Like what did I just experience? Cannot wait to read DMZ COLONY next.
Definitely poetry for academic poets tho. I can imagine novice poets struggling with this one. And that’s not to critique Choi or novice poets. I don’t even really fully think I was able to understand everything going on and that’s not a bad thing. Can’t wait to meet Choi for visiting writers soon!!!!
Definitely poetry for academic poets tho. I can imagine novice poets struggling with this one. And that’s not to critique Choi or novice poets. I don’t even really fully think I was able to understand everything going on and that’s not a bad thing. Can’t wait to meet Choi for visiting writers soon!!!!
March 19, 2024
Don Mee Choi’s newest book of poetry Mirror Nation opens on a bridge in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. The last spy swap between East and West Berlin is taking place on the Bridge of Spies, and Choi is watching her father, a photojournalist, move around the bridge photographing the event. He’s easy to spot because he’s wearing a white winter hat with its ear flaps down.
Mirror Nation is replete with bridges. There’s the Eisener Steg, a footbridge that crosses the Main River in Frankfurt, where Choi lived in the 1980s. There’s the Langenscheidtbrücke in Berlin, which features prominently in Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire. There’s the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which I just mentioned. In Korea, there are the Taedong Bridge in Pyongyang and the Hangang Bridge in Seoul. Choi lived near the latter and used to walk on it as a child. What she tells us at the outset of this book is that certain symbols, like these bridges or the Mercedes Benz advertising logo that she sees from her apartment window in Berlin, along with certain hours on the clock, can send her memory tumbling back in time. “Sometimes, the flow of time is reversed for no apparent reason,” and memories of grief return.
Written while living in Berlin (once a divided city, just as her native Korea remains a divided country), the main event of this book is the May 1980 Gwangju Massacre (as she calls it) or Uprising, when hundreds, if not thousands of students and civilians were killed by Korean soldiers after the newly-installed South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan implemented martial law (with the full backing of the U.S. government). Thousands more were arrested and tortured. This event is threaded amongst moments plucked from Choi’s autobiography along with some free-form writing on a handful of topics like memory, angels, and time. Mirror Nation is the concluding volume of her trilogy of books that use both poetry and prose written in English and Korean, along with a somewhat adventurous use of type fonts, photographs, and other types of imagery. Collectively, the trilogy addresses Korean history during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, racism, and the legacy of the Korean War and subsequent American involvement in Korea. These books are part autobiography, part activism, and part “disobeying history,” as she says in Hardly War. In Seattle’s Wave Books, she’s found a publisher that gives her the design freedom to present her hybrid form of text/image to its best advantage.
Choi’s father, a photojournalist, photographed and filmed events throughout the days of the Gwangju Uprising and Choi herself turned eighteen only months afterward. Eventually, the family emigrated, splitting up between Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United States. Years later, her father related to her at length the frightening days he spent dodging soldiers as he photographed the clashes between protesters and government troops, documenting the dead and wounded. Several of his photographs are reproduced in the book, including a powerful sequence of full-page images. Also included in the book are several once-secret U.S. government documents demonstrating how American diplomats blamed Korean students for the protests and urged the Korean government to use violent force to put down the uprising.
Choi began this trilogy in 2016 with Hardly War, a bravura example of poetry and visual performance that more or less focused on the Korean War, although Choi’s books are never about just one thing. In 2018, DMZ Colony won the National Book Award. Its central theme was the succession of corrupt South Korean governments and the violence they have perpetrated on their own people, both before and after the Korean War. “How does this happen?” she asks. After Korea had been colonized by Japan and “neo-colonized by the US military machine,” it was easy. All the Korean regime needed was language to turn protesters into enemies of the state. “Not difficult to see each other as ‘scums of society,’ ‘commies.'”
Throughout the new book, Choi pays homage to other writers and artists who have influenced her work and Mirror Nation in particular. She quotes W.G. Sebald on “the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries” (Vertigo). There are references to Fritz Fanon, for his writings on post-colonialism, and to W.E.B. Du Bois, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., who studied in Berlin in the 1890s. Walter Benjamin is invoked, of course, since Choi clearly abides by his belief of involuntary memories. But the presiding figures that hover over this book are the angels from Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire, his love letter to Berlin and to the angels that watch over that city.
After three books of war, incredible violence, and a family scattered across the globe, Choi, at the end of Mirror Nation, understands that she, too, is a divided country, a political person and a family person, one person who is consumed with history and grief and another person who stops to marvel at sparrows and swans. “While filming wars,” “[my father] said my sister and I often flashed before his eyes/we were a panorama of sparrows under Mother’s umbrella.”
Choi’s politically engaged, plurilingual, autobiographical, illustrated, and typographically bold trilogy is the worthy successor to her fellow countrywomen Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s now classic book Dictee (1982), which is frequently called a “masterpiece” by reviewers. In terms of their construction, Choi’s books are more complex than Dictee. Reading Choi’s trilogy is like watching a juggler tossing up a plate and an apple and several other odd objects, one of which is a very sharp knife, as our emotions shift from horror to tension to laughter. She can take the reader from anger to childlike silliness over the course of a page or two. Like Dictee, each of Choi’s three books are meant to be considered as a whole, not as a collection of individual poems. This lets her set up a body of references that continually bounce off of each other throughout each volume and throughout the trilogy, giving the reader the kind of complexity and depth that is often only found in novels.
Choi seems to need to use a wide range of modes—to write in poetry and in paragraphs, to write in English and in Korean, to use images. Hardly War even includes a short play, complete with chorus. I think this is how she lets her divided self, her multi-sided-self, speak—her partisan self, her angry and persistent historian self, her family self, and the part of her that is still childlike. In this powerful and moving trilogy, she has turned a poetic mirror not only on Korea, but also on herself.
Mirror Nation is replete with bridges. There’s the Eisener Steg, a footbridge that crosses the Main River in Frankfurt, where Choi lived in the 1980s. There’s the Langenscheidtbrücke in Berlin, which features prominently in Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire. There’s the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which I just mentioned. In Korea, there are the Taedong Bridge in Pyongyang and the Hangang Bridge in Seoul. Choi lived near the latter and used to walk on it as a child. What she tells us at the outset of this book is that certain symbols, like these bridges or the Mercedes Benz advertising logo that she sees from her apartment window in Berlin, along with certain hours on the clock, can send her memory tumbling back in time. “Sometimes, the flow of time is reversed for no apparent reason,” and memories of grief return.
Written while living in Berlin (once a divided city, just as her native Korea remains a divided country), the main event of this book is the May 1980 Gwangju Massacre (as she calls it) or Uprising, when hundreds, if not thousands of students and civilians were killed by Korean soldiers after the newly-installed South Korean military dictator Chun Doo-hwan implemented martial law (with the full backing of the U.S. government). Thousands more were arrested and tortured. This event is threaded amongst moments plucked from Choi’s autobiography along with some free-form writing on a handful of topics like memory, angels, and time. Mirror Nation is the concluding volume of her trilogy of books that use both poetry and prose written in English and Korean, along with a somewhat adventurous use of type fonts, photographs, and other types of imagery. Collectively, the trilogy addresses Korean history during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s, racism, and the legacy of the Korean War and subsequent American involvement in Korea. These books are part autobiography, part activism, and part “disobeying history,” as she says in Hardly War. In Seattle’s Wave Books, she’s found a publisher that gives her the design freedom to present her hybrid form of text/image to its best advantage.
Choi’s father, a photojournalist, photographed and filmed events throughout the days of the Gwangju Uprising and Choi herself turned eighteen only months afterward. Eventually, the family emigrated, splitting up between Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United States. Years later, her father related to her at length the frightening days he spent dodging soldiers as he photographed the clashes between protesters and government troops, documenting the dead and wounded. Several of his photographs are reproduced in the book, including a powerful sequence of full-page images. Also included in the book are several once-secret U.S. government documents demonstrating how American diplomats blamed Korean students for the protests and urged the Korean government to use violent force to put down the uprising.
Choi began this trilogy in 2016 with Hardly War, a bravura example of poetry and visual performance that more or less focused on the Korean War, although Choi’s books are never about just one thing. In 2018, DMZ Colony won the National Book Award. Its central theme was the succession of corrupt South Korean governments and the violence they have perpetrated on their own people, both before and after the Korean War. “How does this happen?” she asks. After Korea had been colonized by Japan and “neo-colonized by the US military machine,” it was easy. All the Korean regime needed was language to turn protesters into enemies of the state. “Not difficult to see each other as ‘scums of society,’ ‘commies.'”
Throughout the new book, Choi pays homage to other writers and artists who have influenced her work and Mirror Nation in particular. She quotes W.G. Sebald on “the silent lament of the angels, who have kept their station above our endless calamities for nigh on seven centuries” (Vertigo). There are references to Fritz Fanon, for his writings on post-colonialism, and to W.E.B. Du Bois, a co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., who studied in Berlin in the 1890s. Walter Benjamin is invoked, of course, since Choi clearly abides by his belief of involuntary memories. But the presiding figures that hover over this book are the angels from Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire, his love letter to Berlin and to the angels that watch over that city.
After three books of war, incredible violence, and a family scattered across the globe, Choi, at the end of Mirror Nation, understands that she, too, is a divided country, a political person and a family person, one person who is consumed with history and grief and another person who stops to marvel at sparrows and swans. “While filming wars,” “[my father] said my sister and I often flashed before his eyes/we were a panorama of sparrows under Mother’s umbrella.”
Choi’s politically engaged, plurilingual, autobiographical, illustrated, and typographically bold trilogy is the worthy successor to her fellow countrywomen Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s now classic book Dictee (1982), which is frequently called a “masterpiece” by reviewers. In terms of their construction, Choi’s books are more complex than Dictee. Reading Choi’s trilogy is like watching a juggler tossing up a plate and an apple and several other odd objects, one of which is a very sharp knife, as our emotions shift from horror to tension to laughter. She can take the reader from anger to childlike silliness over the course of a page or two. Like Dictee, each of Choi’s three books are meant to be considered as a whole, not as a collection of individual poems. This lets her set up a body of references that continually bounce off of each other throughout each volume and throughout the trilogy, giving the reader the kind of complexity and depth that is often only found in novels.
Choi seems to need to use a wide range of modes—to write in poetry and in paragraphs, to write in English and in Korean, to use images. Hardly War even includes a short play, complete with chorus. I think this is how she lets her divided self, her multi-sided-self, speak—her partisan self, her angry and persistent historian self, her family self, and the part of her that is still childlike. In this powerful and moving trilogy, she has turned a poetic mirror not only on Korea, but also on herself.
May 16, 2024
Brilliant!! Just brilliant. Don Mee Choi is brilliant.
April 14, 2024
"Langenscheidtbrucke is above the rail tracks, legless, yet the angels still bathed in evening dew, singing and crying, perched on nearby trees as if they had been waiting for me. Sparrow, what took you so long? How was it that they could speak the rippling language of my childhood? How did they know to wave? That I would return? Spree O beautiful The gate the library the TV tower O marvelous! The overwhelming beauty of Berlin's panorama. I owe it entirely to the wings of utopia" (16).
"=I had talked to the angels, about the gestures of grief. Their arms flung back with splayed hands=" (35).
"Temporal magic frequently manifests as numbers, as zeros. They're like the pockmarks left on a face or FOIA page. They're entirely unavoidable.
Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony. I notice grief has a lone wing, an absolute mark, resembling nothing else. What else can grief see? Saturn perhaps. Nine years later, a hand appears to adjust the clock, the hour of Little Boy" (42).
"When I went back to Benjamin's plaque with Sasha Dugdale, who was visiting me from West Sussex, she pointed out how the word suicide in German was Freitod--free death. At that moment, a panorama of free death appeared before my eyes" (68).
"=I had talked to the angels, about the gestures of grief. Their arms flung back with splayed hands=" (35).
"Temporal magic frequently manifests as numbers, as zeros. They're like the pockmarks left on a face or FOIA page. They're entirely unavoidable.
Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony. I notice grief has a lone wing, an absolute mark, resembling nothing else. What else can grief see? Saturn perhaps. Nine years later, a hand appears to adjust the clock, the hour of Little Boy" (42).
"When I went back to Benjamin's plaque with Sasha Dugdale, who was visiting me from West Sussex, she pointed out how the word suicide in German was Freitod--free death. At that moment, a panorama of free death appeared before my eyes" (68).
May 26, 2024
"Du Bois—..."two warring ideals in one dark body" "shut out from their world by a vast veil."
The vast veil, when stretched across the Pacific Ocean, has a different function. Its militarization is ever heightened to contain the imagined enemy, to perpetuate imperial hegemonic control. The so-called Manifest Destiny is woven into its every fiber. The veil manifests as an endless barbed wire fence across the DMZ of two Koreas. The veil of unreasonableness. My twoness is born out of national division. My other is perpetually Red, ready to nuke or be nuked. My twinness manifests within unreasonable destiny, vast homesickness...
When I went back to Benjamin's plaque with Sasha Dugdale, who was visiting me from West Sussex, she pointed out how the word suicidein German was Freitod—free death." (67)
The vast veil, when stretched across the Pacific Ocean, has a different function. Its militarization is ever heightened to contain the imagined enemy, to perpetuate imperial hegemonic control. The so-called Manifest Destiny is woven into its every fiber. The veil manifests as an endless barbed wire fence across the DMZ of two Koreas. The veil of unreasonableness. My twoness is born out of national division. My other is perpetually Red, ready to nuke or be nuked. My twinness manifests within unreasonable destiny, vast homesickness...
When I went back to Benjamin's plaque with Sasha Dugdale, who was visiting me from West Sussex, she pointed out how the word suicidein German was Freitod—free death." (67)
November 1, 2024
Charmed circles — circling images — the potential origins of an image coming towards the end, bringing together the cloud of images — guiding you to the shape and sound of a letter, a colonial charmed circle, to where to look in the photos — to the photos that obscure meaning, doubled up, repeating in strange circling motions, odd bridges, = s, that which is and is not…fascinating to read next to Austerlitz but I can say quite confidently I didn’t understand
July 17, 2024
"A stupid girl in the mirror. Now what? Grief tells me to live."
As a Korean American, I have been sheltered from war, though it lives in all of us. My mother left Gyeonggi-do in or around 1979, but my halmeoni stayed. We've never met. I wonder about the han that lives inside of her.
A book of parallels. No notes.
As a Korean American, I have been sheltered from war, though it lives in all of us. My mother left Gyeonggi-do in or around 1979, but my halmeoni stayed. We've never met. I wonder about the han that lives inside of her.
A book of parallels. No notes.
June 10, 2024
swan swan swan
October 28, 2024
Fascinating and complex book. Mixes images and words in a poetic way to compare State Oppression in Korea and the US.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews