'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title. The politics and poetics of language, culture and self all collide in Myung Mi Kim's Dura, a contemporary classic of Asian American and experimental literature, brought back into print by Nightboat Books on the tenth anniversary of its orginal publication. But as Kim writes in a later section of the book, such methods are well suited to her subject: 'Call ancestry lost/ Collapse and valence/ Brevity and gesture/ House with rooms cut of various sizes/ An America as big as it is.'Ĭopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Myung Mi Kim Dura Series No.: NAP 28 ISBN: 978-0976718598, Pages: American Literature, Poetry: A Sun & Moon title. This doesn't mean that these furtive, cartographic poems won't frustrate readers looking for straightforward narrative or coherence. Times the picture was in color/ Body moving in circle be fire/ What looked like black in the Korean newspaper was my son's blood/ Body moving in circle be fire.' Throughout, Kim finds ways to make her very personal relationship to issues of immigration and cultural severing inclusive.

Each disjunctive, incantatory verse-paragraph of the long middle section, 'Thirty and Five Books,' suggests a story: 'Percussive/ In the L.A. The mythical first section, 'Cosmography,' sets the stage for her reading of history's crumbling codex, a 'False vocalization of the consonantal text' and a 'Transcription barely permeable,' which is finally 'The beginning of things.' The next three sections collate cryptic tracings of the march of trade and 'civilization' across the oceans: 'Swag drum/ Inland filth/ Surmise commodity,' Kim writes. Building on the achievements of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Susan Howe, Kim continues here to engage the reader in re-witnessing this morally arid landscape. With the small press titles Under Flag (1992) and The Bounty (1996) Kim astonished readers in the know with passionate, formally investigative cataloguings of colonialism, war and rampant capital in the domestic and public spheres. Request PDF What Story What Story What Sound: The Nomadic Poetics of Myung Mi Kims Dura In diaspora literature the experience of exile, displacement.

Dura by Myung Mi Kim