"Every poetry that lives up to its true tongue is an ancient soul writing its author. Decades ago, Kim Hyesoon's ancient soul met Cindy Juyoung Ok's soul. The Hell of That Star is the reunion of two poet-ghosts."--Fady Joudah, author of [.] "Out of charred books, the censor's black coal tar, "the whip of the word," in The Hell of That Star Kim Hyesoon unforgettably enacts experience of and resistance to the neocolonial U.S.-sponsored dictatorship in postwar South Korea, with its relentless censorship, police brutality, economic exploitation, and martial law. Kim imagines a 'language without language,' the placeless place of the 'midstness' of life and death, visceral, intestinal, with curse-words spat like seeds, pus seeping from eyes, a 'corpse heavier than the whole world', 'I--I--I--I--I.

' Her fierce interrogations of empire and patriarchy, the grotesque violence and violations of a woman's life under an authoritarian regime, are embodied by an utterly original, utterly unique voice--raw, sardonic, scatological, agonized, enacting the emotional extremity one only finds in ancient tragedy. As Michael Scammell, commenting on Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don , observed: 'The greater the original, the more translations it can bear.' Kim Hyesoon is blessed to have as her collaborators in English brilliant poet-translators; Ok's translation is a work of true translatus, carrying-across Kim's ferocity and extremity into an English of commensurate intensity, inventiveness, and strangeness, restless in its questioning, transforming anguish and anger into expanding possibility."--Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes from the Divided Country and Notes from the North "The English-language renditions snap and haze language through shatters of earth and body, in keeping with Kim's challenge; they resynthesize fallout from her words into alt-selves speaking some parts human, some parts bird."--Kristin Dykstra, translator of The Winter Garden Photograph "What does it mean to speak from a place where 'the tongue is banished and exiled'? How do you make the experience of extremity real, to the reader who has not suffered it? It is hard to sum up the psychological, political, and spiritual ambitions of Kim Hyesoon's collection, but Cindy Juyoung Ok's muscular translation compels for the ways it transmits the urgencies of Kim's visions as well as protects the vulnerabilities in those exigencies."--Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing.