Grotesque Weather and Good People
Grotesque Weather and Good People
By Lim Solah
translated by Olan Munson and Oh Eunkyung
Paperback / 102p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1939568-43-4
A debut English translation of contemporary free verse poetry by award-winning South Korean poet and novelist Lim Solah. By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Writing in a simple vernacular, Lim’s lyric I struggles with the poet’s call to “wonder” in a world lurking with quiet dissonance and horror. Many of these poems incorporate elements of drama and fiction, including documentary, collapsing the boundaries between the imaginary and the real as they explore the writer's relationship with multitudinous versions of her many selves. While BTS light up the charts and Korean films gather international awards, Lim's poems paint a strange and disorienting map of the consciousness of the so-called "spec" generation that calls their country Hell Chosun.
Lim Solah is a writer from South Korea. She is the author of the novel The Best Life (Munhakdongnae 2015), the poetry collection Get Packing (Hyeondaemunhak 2020), and the short story collection Snow, Person and Snowperson (Munhakdongnae 2019). She is the recipient of numerous awards such as the JoongAng New Writer's Award for Poetry, Sin Dong-yup Prize for Literature, and the Moonji Literary Award. Lim received the Arts Council Korea's Young Art Frontier Grant in 2014.
Olan Munson is a freelance translator and graduate of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Munson is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.
Oh Eunkung is a freelance translator and graduate of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Based in Germany, Oh works to introduce contemporary Korean writers to an international readership.
PRAISE
“Lim Solah is a rare poet-seer who looks so closely at creatures great and small that she plunges in and inhabits them. In doing so, her introspections take us face to face with the city of Seoul, full of gusto and disgust, showing us the best way to see something is to become it. A post-human prayer book, urban survivor’s guide, and primer on the meteorology of awareness, this is a tome of ecstasy—open only to those courageous enough to venture outside themselves.”
“Lim Solah is a joyous, irreverent auteur whose remit remains unapologetically visionary: ‘I want to see a giraffe. I go to see a giraffe. // I fail to see a giraffe / so I make a giraffe.’ Quizzing the quiddities inside our everyday mundanities, here is a poet “peep[ing] into the rifts in the air” ... Lim’s enchantments are incantatory responses, laboring playfully toward a powerfully estranging logic. Read these poems: see, sense, feel as if for a first time.”
괴괴한 날씨와 착한 사람들
Copyright © 2017 by Lim Solah
Originally published in 2017 by Moonji Publishing Co., Ltd.
All rights reserved.
