Although poet Kim Hyesoon began her career as an editor at a South Korean publishing house in the late 1970s, to many contemporary readers the political circumstances surrounding the beginnings of the profession may seem eerily familiar. In the introduction to his latest collection Lady Notranslator Jack Saebyok Jung describes this period in South Korean history as “ruled by a regime whose violent whims could destroy lives within hours – where the secret police arrested anyone deemed ideologically threatening.”
It was originally published anonymously for eight months in 2014 on the blog of South Korea’s largest publishing house, Munhakdongne. Lady No a collection of experimental prose and poetry (as Kim calls it shisanmunor verse-prose), which serves as documentation of Kim’s first and only foray into digital performance art. Set in a fictional country called “Aerok” (Korean palindrome) Kim goes by the nickname (pronounce) ah-ah) to explore themes of work, creativity, motherhood, spiritual exhaustion and authoritarianism through her trademark surreal, paradoxical and often haunting lens.
A self-proclaimed “witch”, Kim alchemizes the ills of her society into imagistic bardos, turning action into tranquility and everyday reality into occult contradictions. As Jung writes, Kim was once detained by the authorities after he helped edit and publish a Korean translation of the biography of American labor organizer Mary G. Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones. Kim refused to give the name or location of the book’s translator, and was slapped in the face a total of seven times by his interrogators. Turning repression into inspiration, Kim used the experience in her work, writing “seven poems about the incident, one for each stroke.”
All through Lady NoKim uses negation as a literary device, even beginning with the collection’s title. “To live and write in this system was to hear the word ‘no’ again and again,” writes Jung, “as in, ‘No, you cannot write this. No, you cannot talk about this. No, you cannot even think about this.’ As South Korea modernized, the emphatic “no” to censorship and repression gave way to pressures and demands that accompanied and fueled the country’s burgeoning and often unchecked capitalist growth. Jung describes how a new kind of “no” has taken root, claiming that “there is no time to slow down in a country driven by breakneck market expansion.”
Yet, even amid the injustices and horrors of late-stage capitalism, Kim transforms the gravity of the political situation into a poetry that contradicts and forces one to slow down. In some ways, Kim’s denial may be just another display of emptiness, or what he refers to in the book’s afterword as “transparent poetry.” In “What Is Inspiration,” he writes, “There’s no poem as good as it’s put into words,” and you get a glimpse of the koan-like shapes that make Kim’s work so rich, a phantasmic presence beyond being and nothingness.
–Mike Sheffield, Web Editor
Fiction and poetry
To write fiction is to record that life is a wonderful lie.
Foreordained that after you and I are gone, it’s just a pale lie
will remain, it will become even fainter.
Thus pre-fixing the sight of a lie on a street without “I”.
he is swept away by other lies.
To write a poem is to witness my death in poetry.
The peak of poetry is the moment of death, the moment when only
death will remain in the form of a mustard seed and everything will be different
absence.
Thus, writing poetry now means that we persevere
embracing firefly-like death with gentle breath.
Mammal
In front of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, where the air is thin,
I have an out of body experience. And so,
As I look down,
I can only imagine how heavy this mammal’s body must be.
It doesn’t matter. This sadness is transparent disinterest. A lovely one
of the gaze.
Lama monks dressed in white aprons,
Crescent and rectangular swing blades
And soften the bodies of the dead.
But the eagles show no signs of favor.
It annoys them
This is what they get after being invited here.
Lady No, who hails from a lower town,
It can taste horrible.
And for the first time in his life, he wants to look good
eagles.
Lady No why a mammal who shits and sucks breasts?
Why is Lady No an animal with hot fingers and sticky sweat?
Why is Lady No a female whose breasts bulge at loud noises?
Such a burden in life.
Lady No smells so foul that she is afraid of the smell of flowers,
he was afraid his breath would kill them.
(Why does Lady No have these two long arms?
Please don’t give me flowers.
We all come from the earth
But here is the only flower of this flower,
He barely opened his eyes after rising from the ground.
If Lady No touches you,
A moment can turn brutal.
I don’t even dare to stand next to a wide open flower.)
A fish with a shaved head
I spent one night in a Buddhist college where female monks worked.
That night a storm slowly blew to the north.
Waking up from my dream, I heard the symphony from the great hall
up in the morning.
After the lone wooden bell awakened all creation, a
the clear bell of the temple awakened the living creatures of the earth and the mute
wooden clapper stirred the water creatures. Finally, the piercing
a metallic clatter from the kitchen resonated with a cry that it was
he awakened the beings of the sky. It was a sound symposium. After
they said a few words to the Buddha, the teachers, the parents and
the masses, sung by a choir in the church. When I opened the door,
I saw a part of the temple opening like a lotus made of light
the storm. The great hall was a bright blooming flower, as if it were
eye of the storm
And in the great hall there were nuns with shaved heads
singing, bringing their little hands together like a school of fish.
When morning came, I opened my umbrella and was led away
by the head monk through the garden. When we crossed paradise
bridge over the valley, the monk told me a story about the rain rituals
nuns used to perform.
When the night of drought comes, the women are monks that they were
one born in the year of the dragon must bathe in the valley while
wearing cauldron covers on their heads. It always brought rain. How
did they have to bathe for a long time for the rain ritual? Until it rains, of course.
It’s like waking up all of creation with your morning prayers, nuns
they once woke up the god of rain by bathing. My umbrella turned upside down
across, and there were fish in the strong current in the valley, and they
it looked like hands singing in a choir. Shaved head
the fish were not washed away by the rough water. They curled up like
if they would pray.
What is Inspiration
A student spoke
“I can’t find inspiration, so I don’t think I’ll be able to do it
designation.”
Indeed, it has been so long since I heard the word inspiration.
it is so. No poem is as good as it was before it was spoken
into words.
Poetry is written when “I” remain in another state of being.
Poetry leads the “I” to another state of existence.
Poetry is in another world called the poetic state.
Of course, the catalyst for the disclosure is usually moral outrage or
existential alienation,
And the process of imagination is often political.
This indignation, this alienation, this hope leads “I”
Being in a different state of being.
Poetry is the unfolding of another being
And to sink into another state.
This is the cry of silence.
Inspiration is the response one gives when one has heard the words
the other, “I”
This is the impossibility of the answer.
Therefore, after a poem is finished,
It is correct that the “I” disappears from the poem.
After absorbing it all, pieces of “I” remain in the glass.
I’d be lucky to just be “me”.
the remains necessary to dispose of the property.
♦
From the book Lady No written by Kim Hyesoon. Copyright 2026, Kim Hyesoon. English translation copyright © 2026 by Jack Saebyok Jung. Originally as Not that’s what i said In Korea in 2022 by Munhakdongne Publishing Group. Reprinted with permission from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
