Phantom Pain Wings

<p><strong>Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)</strong></p><p><strong>2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice</strong></p><p>Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon’s portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.</p><p>‘Reads like a variety of horror – haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic. … In Kim’s metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power.’ <em>New York Times</em>, The Best Poetry of 2023</p>