I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World

In his English-language debut, Korean poet and performance artist Kim calmly renders a world in which inert objects assume human traits, while humans themselves become mere traces. The human characters who populate Kim’s formally varied poems remain eerie and impermanent, detached from their place and time: a “never existed baby” cuts sunshine with scissors, and there are rope-jumpers “with duct tape over their mouths” whose “bodies disappear a little more in the air” every time they leap. Even family members become more body part and clothing item than personality, such as the mother whose decades-old floral underpants stay uncannily fresh “No matter how many people touch them.” In contrast, Kim personifies nonhuman subjects with bodies, feelings, and desires: there’s a well that “develops eyes” and a “long tongue,” and a room that nightly “flies to the outside of space” and proclaims its loneliness, the feeling of which is compared to “the time it takes to understand the music of your body.” Several long poems weave through time and conflate temporal points, lending the collection a feeling of grander scale. Kim leaves his readers with a sense that there are bigger, more permanent things than people. (Apr.)