Because of this beauty, this exquisite beauty of our sphere, our halo world.
- From “Berlin 30.11.2019,” pg. 78
Don Mee Choi’s latest release is another unforgettable movement into the realm of documentation, poetry, and memoir. It is a book where the author’s footsteps and gazes unfold experience into story. It is lucid, subtle, and epic, a cascade of ideas that bridge phantasmagoria and verisimilitude, photographically connecting image to definition to implication.
Following the National Book Award-winning DMZ Colony, this new work affords another view of Choi’s relationship with Korea and its recent violent history. A sense of restless, unsettled inquiry positions the poet translator. For those familiar with Choi’s previous works, also including Hardly War, or her many translations, the themes will feel resonant and extensions of an ongoing autobiographical worldview. Choi’s work is a continuation of what has been established: the intensely personal. It continues to channel the essence of the artist as fully involved, fully committed, fully immersed in the world that inspires.
In Mirror Nation, Choi’s lenses include her father and his ongoing nomadic movement as a war photographer; triggering and inspiring moments of time spent in Germany that bridge memory and presence across history and the present; and archival documents that move across event and circumstance as sources, nodes, connectors, translations; and, of course, the act of translation. The book focuses on the Gwangju Uprising in May of 1980, a response to a coup in Korea leading the country to martial law and dictatorship.
One of the mysteries is that sometimes home—particularly bridges—appears painfully remote. But the future juxtaposes.
- From “Bridges of =,” pg. 9
Opening Choi’s new book is a return to home. It is a return to family. It is a return to self. A act of piecing together, of collecting, of working through, of moving toward, of uncovering. And then the reaching of meaning, of telling the story, of shedding light. The familiar dreamlike pursuit is at once beautiful and chaotic, as Choi works through bridges, clocks, bombs, and photographs to unpack symbols and discover the wisdom waiting within. The work is crucially expanded through media, experimentation, exploration, discovery, and documentation.
The book combines type, scanned and manipulated images of text and textual erasure, and reproduced photographs. The result is a spread that is at once linear and collage. Using large and small swaths of space, Mirror Nation leads to a unique reading experience always exquisite and always uproarious. It redefines illumination and what it means to know and to know more, to learn, to grow, to feel.
Within the pages are motifs of light and shadow. What has been covered and forced to recess through the brutality of regimes, through the wastes of occupation? What has been lost, who has been disappeared, where are the the voices that have been silenced, converted to rubble to the vacuous? Choi raises these questions and sits with them, sits with the grief, the sense of loss. The questions are asked, and in their presence, they can be approached, answered, answered better.
Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony. I notice grief has a lone wing, an absolute mark, resembling nothing else. What else can grief see?
- From “Gwangju 26.5.1980,” pg. 42
Poetry often rings true as a moment for the individual voice to serve as beacon, but as with Choi’s previous works, that which mesmerizes and heals is the synthesis of the collective: that what was truly lost is not gone, has not disintegrated into any absolute or finality. Contemporary archival and translation work and the poet’s love for her father connect the abyss of violence to a relief and emergence found in the poetry of Mirror Nation.
Choi’s writing will undoubtedly continue to captivate readers of the avant garde and readers of contemporary and historical Korean poetry. And yet it is another book committed to liberation, continued to deconstructing systems of state violence, of imperialism and colonialism, of global occupation, corruption, and the seething grotesque of control, all running parallel with neoliberalism, with obfuscation, with the seething of suffering.
The underpinnings of the mirror are the patterns that run rampant across space and time, across one country to the next. Across the book Choi highlights and triangulates via closely connected historical counterpoints, bookends that reflect the patterns across context. “In my dreams, disparate places are seamlessly linked,” she writes (“Gwangju 26.5.1980,” pg. 27). The division of Korea into North and South, the violence against Black activists during the Miami riots in 1980 to World War II, bombings in Japan, the persecutions in Nazi Germany. The poetry as kaleidoscope. The works and ideas of Shōhei Imamura, Walter Benjamin, Homer, Frantz Fanon, and others, this is not new but is newly collected: the poet as chorus,
“Nation is a nation is a nation is a nation / Swan is a swan is a swan” (from “Imperial Panorama 1980,” pg. 93) closes Choi in her book’s penultimate piece, chant-like and ethereal. The juxtaposed evocations of the nation and the swan are reminiscent of the anthropomorphic and powerfully wild images from works by Yi Sang and Kim Hyesoon. But never these images are also cautionary, abstract and yielding to ceaselessness and hopelessness. The world and its structures, deconstructed, may still feel at once alive and insurmountable.
Empire is everywhere.
- From “Miami 18.5.1980,“ pg. 65)
But still the mirror. And within the mirror the gaze: who is to watch the nation, who bears witness and calls upon it, who explores it, ruinous or bleeding or blinding? Mirror Nation brings all of us—the poet and the subject and the reader—closer to some pinnacle of truth that we would otherwise be far from without the text. This poetry, as documentation and as process, leads us forward, together.
Greg Bem lived in Seattle for 13 years before moving to Spokane, where he has resided since 2023. He is a community college librarian and union organizer, small press publisher, poet and performer, and book reviewer, among other things. His reviews are linked on his website, and can be found published here in International Examiner as well as in Rain Taxi, North of Oxford, Exacting Clam, and Another Chicago Magazine.
