Poetry

October 2014 Poetry Feature

This month it’s our pleasure to present new work from Korea: three poems by Lim Sun-Ki translated by Suh Hong Won.

Close-up of Leaves
Poet Lim Sun-Ki was born 1968 in Incheon, Korea. He graduated from Yonsei University Department of French Language and Literature and received his doctoral degree in Linguistics at L’université Paris-Nanterre (Paris X). In 2006, Lim published his first collection of poems, Poem in a Pocket, and a second collection, Flower and Flower Are Swaying, was published in 2012. His third collection, Winter Tidings Fall on the Harbor, was published recently in August 2014 (Munhak-dongnae press). He is currently a professor at Yonsei University Department of French Language and Literature.
Translator Suh Hong Won was born 1962 in Hong Kong. He received a bilingual primary and secondary education, spanning Korea, England, and Hong Kong, and graduated with a B.A. in business administration from Yonsei University. He then moved on to English literature and received a Ph.D. in English at the University of Notre Dame. A professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University, Suh’s interests lie in English renaissance poetry, esp. Milton, rhetoric and translation, and English education. He is currently translating into English all three collections of poetry by Lim Sun-Ki.

October 2014 Poetry Feature
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Bar Poem

By TARA SKURTU 

margarita

I’m here on the patio, no appetite,
drinking a salty margarita. I feel
my liver, ignore it like last night’s
glass of water. I’m tired of writing
you down when I should be writing
poems about place. Dusk hits beyond
the man playing the red accordion
on the corner, and the strays of Iași
bark out a score backed by dissonant
frequencies of the evening bells.
This morning I took a walk and found
a noseless man pumping gypsy love songs
on his accordion. I stared into the holes
of his face and thought about the girl
with the green ribbon around her neck.
Had you read the story backwards,
we might not have lost our heads.
It’s late. What time is it?
I ask a poet who isn’t you.
There’s time enough, he says.

Tara Skurtu teaches Creative Writing at Boston University, where she received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and an Academy of American Poets Prize.

Bar Poem
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When an Old Classmate Learns I Am a Lesbian

By JULIE MARIE WADE

“Oh my God! I knew it! I always knew it. I was like Julie is so gay, & people were like oh, whatever, you just think everybody’s gay because it’s an all-girls school, but I knew I wasn’t gay, & I knew most of those girls weren’t gay, so I was like fuck you, Jasmine, go suck on one of your Jolly Rancher rings! Do you remember those?

When an Old Classmate Learns I Am a Lesbian
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