Plugs are unthreadingfrom every part of my bodysuspended like umbilical cordsI open the door and go outsideFoul airclusters at the end of each plugpeople everywherewalk with plugs suspended from their bodiescharged by the world’s ragein the spaces betweenpebbles clothed in the air float buoyantly
On the Street
Yi Won
Translated from the Korean
Feature Date
- April 26, 2019
Series
- Translation
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Copyright © 2019 by Yi Won.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Yi Won
Yi Won is an award-winning poet from South Korea, whose avant-garde work is at the cutting edge of the contemporary Korean poetry scene. Born in Hwaseong, Gyeonggido Province in 1968, she holds a BA in creative writing from Seoul Institute of the Arts and a graduate degree from Dankook University’s creative writing department. She has published five poetry collections, When They Ruled the World(1996), A Thousand Moons Float in the River Yahoo! (2001), The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (2007), History of an Impossible Page (2012), and Let Love Be Born (2017), each from the publisher Munhak kwa Jiseongsa (Literature and Intellect). Her first prose collection, The Smallest Discovery, was published in November, 2017 by Minumsa. She currently lives in Seoul.
E. J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize (Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Her memoir, The Magican Language of Others, will be published by Tin House Books in 2020. Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, Seattle Review of Books, The Margins, PEN America, The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean Press, 2014) and elsewhere. Koh accepted fellowships and scholarships from The American Literary Translators Association, The MacDowell Colony, Kundiman, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and The Jack Straw Writers Program. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Poetry with a joint-degree in Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. She is completing her PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle for English Language and Literature. She has been featured on Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, Culture Trip’s “10 Americans Changing the Face of Poetry,” The Seattle Channel, Brit + Co’s “16 Modern Poets” and others.
Spring 2019
Co-Poetry Editors
Iliana Rocha
Alyssa Jewell
Co-Founder & Managing Editor
Justin Bigos
Waxwing is a literary journal promoting the tremendous cultural diversity of contemporary American literature, alongside international voices in translation. It is the editors’ belief that American literature is thriving, both in terms of aesthetics and cultural inclusiveness. Waxwing believes that American voices are, at their cores, both multicultural and multinational, and so the editors’ mission is to include American writers from all cultural identities — in terms of race, ethnicity, indigenous tribe, gender, class, sexuality, age, education, ability, language, religion, and region — alongside international voices, published bilingually. Waxwing aims to broadcast as widely as possible, in each and every issue, singular voices — and to hear these voices together, in all their harmony and dissonance.
Waxwing is published in October, February, and June of each year. The journal publishes poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, reviews, art, and music, as well as international literature in translation. Waxwing currently accepts submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations; all other content is solicited.
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