with uncertainty becomes one side
in protest against a thing totally unknowable and
raise arm
suddenly leaf, like tree striving to possess leaves
—“Raise Arm,” Page 44
In Lee Sumyeong’s extraordinary collection Just Like, we see the Korean poet break open language again, and again, and again. This is a book that approaches both the foundational and the prophetic. It explores what language has done and what it can do.
It is a book that draws one in through its eerie underpinnings and has lasting effects on its readership. It is a book that lingers. It mesmerizes and fills and reverberates. And as the shaken dust is settled and scattered through time, nothing is the same. The poetry in Just Like is so similar, so faintly resonant, and it has tweaked reality just enough to open the door for radical growth.
Woke slowly. Woke crying. Tears fell without reason from within sleep. The shoulders scattered. Who was crying who was briefly hidden there are times even when I’m a girl times even when morning becomes perforated.
—“Someone Briefly,” Page 35
Each section in Just Like contains a sequence of poems written in verse and prose. These are poems that tend to feel correct at their beginnings, in their language, but are mutated, resulting in the poem as question and as viewpoint.
They are eerie poems, visceral and shocking, absurd but logical. Lee wrote these poems over a decade ago, but they have now been translated in a blossom of eloquence and grotesqueness from Colin Leemarshall, presented here in a clean, accessible edition.
Climbed a tree climbed alone and in secret and as soon as I climbed the tree started growing crooked.
—“Climbed a Tree,” Page 40
This is a book supremely about language. The translated text is provided: The readers are gifted with the English translation. Grammar, syntax, and sentence structure is all tweaked, pulled apart, jammed together, to offer a startling sense of linguistic processing and room for an emerged poetic core.
These are not abstract poems, but the approach to language has been abstracted and modified to fit the poet’s voice. To read Lee’s poetry is to read poetry that feels like it was lost and recovered and will strengthen us all in its recovery.
Like a greeting that had arrived by itself I participated fairly in the alone. The alone was fathered here and there. Several times more in this way I resembled something correct.
—“Several Times,” Page 59
At roughly 125 pages, Just Like is not a short book. The text is divided into three main sections, sequences of poetry that feel like one another but are ultimately fragmented into chunks, sub-bodies, in a way that aligns with the text: The book could be one long sequence, but instead it is a woven body. It weaves within itself.
There are considerations. Questions about beginnings, middles, and ends, which, as a larger structure, mimics the smaller structures across the text. Each section feels familiar and blurry. They are not named and do not have any major differences. While they may have subtext, any subtext is far from obvious. Instead, the sections feel more like patterns, like crests of waves that all ultimately crash and die against the conventions of the shore.
For a long time observe slowly rippling waves.
When there is rippling the water does not occur.
Every moment walking alone reaching non-occurring space.
On this ground I am perhaps thoroughgoingly thickened.
—“Slowly,” Page 64
The poems are often surreal visual compositions. They mix internal abstractions with descriptive scenes and scenarios. The settings and messages are grotesque and disruptive through the mutation of language. Thus, we have a book with images that begin in a realm of familiarity but are thrown off-kilter through Lee’s voice and language breakdown.
To call it experimental would be a disservice: the language of Lee’s poetry is far from playful. It emerges as normal, or normalized, from the poet. It feels adjacent to the mainstream, not far off from typical uses of language, simple and common vocabulary and phrases. It feels consistent and evokes alternative knowledge and perception systems. This regularity takes it even further, into strange depths of the bizarre that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible.
Overhead will pass an elderly person with a box-stuffed wheelbarrow
countless boxes falling behind the elderly person
—“Covered a Box,” Page 76
Lee is in the camp of contemporary Korean poets who drive into language in full blast, breaking it apart, a language that is combustible and can be configured, reconfigured, positioned, repositioned. She twists language, and deforms and reforms it for bountiful purposes that seek eerie heights but maintain an exquisitely personal edge.
Reflective, personal undertones are feminist in nature, often providing readership with relational contexts and revealing power dynamics within society. Want and wonder, lack and fervor. The position of being in position: an identification of one’s place and how one feels about their place.
lie on the water
breathe out
want to throw the pond
today I am the most
do not stand up
—“Today I Am the Most,” Page 86
Lee and her poetry are within the continuum of contemporary voices that graciously are presented to Western audiences through significant translation. This surrealism is concerned with body, identity, and positionality, and an offering of the extraordinary.
Just Like opens with an extensive foray into the technicalities of language provided by translator Leemarshall. A foray into the history of the translator’s discovery of Lee and the process of translating is a welcome addition to this body of work. The collection closes with a fantastic interview between the translator and the poet.
Here we have greater detailing of the work, through an intimate but stunningly intellectual exchange that may spur an additional read of the text. Overall, Just Like as a collection of poetry and, as a realizable work, is a must-read for anyone fascinated by, inspired by, or concerned with contemporary Korean poetry.
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.
