WHITE PINE PRESS

“Against despair, Kim Sa-In’s poems remember with grace and delicacy the names and gestures of the everyday—persons forgotten by South Korean economic prosperity, “the lips of baby pebbles blue with cold,” and “the distant hills through the window.” These poems are an invitation to internal landscapes of lyrical intensity rendered pitch perfect in Brother Anthony of Taizé and Susan Hwang’s translation.”

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                        —Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, author of The Interrogation Room

 

 

“Kim Sa-in is a devotional poet who ably serves "all the unconsidered things in the world"--a cosmos flower, a turtle dove cooing near a firing range, the way a mourner offers a cup of wine to a widow. His eye for ordinary details that resonate in their new settings, his ability to discern social and political patterns in seemingly random events, his determination to plumb the depths of experience mundane and otherwise--these make him a singular presence in Korean poetry. Liking in Silence is an essay in how to hear anew the silence all around us. Listen up.”

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                        --Christopher Merrill, author of Necessities

Kim Sa-in was born in Boeun, North Chungcheon Province, in 1955. He has published two collections of poetry, Night Letters (bame sseuneun pyeonji, 1987) and Liking in Silence (gamanhi joahaneun, 2006), four collections of criticism, including  A Deep Reading of the Novels of Park Sang-Ryung (2001), and a book of essays, A Warm Bowl of Rice (2006). Following time in prison in the early 1980s he began writing poetry and co-founded the magazine Poetry and Economy. Among his awards are the Sin Dong-Yeop Grant for Writing (1987), the Modern Literature Prize for poetry (2005), and the Daesan Literature Award for poetry (2006).  He teaches creative writing at Dongdeok Women's University, and hosts broadcast programs devoted to poetry and spirituality. In late 2010 he participated in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Kim was appointed as the 7th President of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

 

Brother Anthony of Taizé was born in England in 1942 and has been living in Korea since 1980. He taught English literature at Sogang University, Seoul, for many years and is now an emeritus professor there, as well as a chair-professor at Dankook University. He has published more than thirty volumes of English translations of modern Korean poetry, including eight volumes by Ko Un. His Korean name is An Sonjae. 

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Susan Hwang is a doctoral student studying modern Korean literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She received an MA at Columbia University and is presently writing her dissertation on the history of literary criticism in South Korea since the mid-1960s, with a focus on the changing relationship between dissident politics and literary production