Phantom Limbs, the first book of poetry by Korean writer Lee Min-ha, explores the hauntings within us all
Your body’s wetland is revealed to be neither light nor dark. Why don’t you stick a fin into your heel and stretch your left eye? Ripples roll across the mirror.
(from “Mirror Game”)
To read Phantom Limbs, the first book of poetry by Korean writer Lee Min-ha, is to undergo transformation and begin a conversation between the self and the world. Lee’s writing opens up new pathways through which to discover the bodily relationship with self, with world, with timeline. Each piece is incredibly provocative, with small visions and visages of the flight of the everyday that correspond with loss, suffering, and the rigid texture of escape. How we are haunted, how we are filled with memories and they diminish us.
Lee fuses relationships, places, and feelings into each space between line, between sentence, between breath. A web emerges, an ontology of connectivity is established. It is at once abstract and filled with the tangible, experiential documentation of the poet. Through the book, the poet is calling forward the sense that surrealism is not a zeroing in but an opening up, an encompassing and a sense of the unfolding nature of existence. This is a surrealism of pain, of discomfort, of melancholy: where the unconscious burdens and challenges. Lee’s inner examinations lead to questions around the nature of the poet and their ongoing, insufferable commitments.
I am born within poetry. Inside of and within poetry is where I occur. If so, what is poetry?
(from “Talk Show,” page 52)
This sense of recognition of the poet as a channeling of language, where language is truth iterated and reiterated, is reflected too in a fluttering sequence of epiphanies across rigid and brief poetic snapshots, is integrated by the author into the act of writing, the act of self-expression. Phantom Limbs, as its name alludes but does not solely imply, is an incredibly personal book, one that is driven by the whims and aims of the author through the challenges of visitation. It is empowered with beliefs and statements, of miniature manifestoes and anecdotes of poetics seeking to operationalize and discover and embrace comfort in the process of writing poetry.
There is discovery and there is emergence and there is transformation. That does not guarantee easy: in fact, many of Lee’s images and examinations are far from ease. But her process is ultimately toward a satisfaction, where poetry can and does lead the writer in their life and their conversations. It is a personal therapeutic endeavor, it is a catharsis and an effort to overcome that which sits still upon the memory and upon the page.
I step through their bodies and gradually become an ellipses
(from “Tomb of Air”)
This bilingual release of Phantom Limbs from Ugly Duckling Presse, as elegantly translated by Jein Han contains just over 100 pages of English poetry. It is followed by the afterword containing a wondrous portrait of the book and information about Lee Min-ha, “Phantom Pains and Fragmented Selves,” by Jack Saebyok Jung. The collection contains a balanced blend of verse and prose poetry, across four sections: “Between Fog Street and the Bakery,” “A Chair That Stands,” “The Death of K, the World’s One and Only Repairman,” and “An Apple Tree Ascending the Staircase.”
The majority of the individual poems in this collection do not have specific footnotes or contain direct explanations, and with context missing, the reader is occasionally presented with moments of absurdity and confusion: where is the poet; what is she witnessing; how has she reached her feelings? The mystery and unresolved nature of these poems is exquisitely surreal, offering opportunity for exploration and pondering for the reader to explore beyond the text.
The gray-haired boy would sit on a boulder and play his golden flute
The sun would perch like a hump on his hunched back
A lullaby would flow out like wine and soak the cartridge paper
One by one, the children would yawn, some would burp
From the children’s mouths, thorny cats would leap out
and disappear into the layered waves
(from “The Magic Flute”)
A sequence of puzzle boxes, these pieces also reveal the everyday nature of the human condition: the grand mysteries of a life that could be anyone’s life, but is the poet’s life, and is uniquely her own, derived from her specific sight, specific engagement with and movement beyond reality. It is at once familiar and distant, at once commonly connected and exquisitely otherly.
Phantom Limbs was originally published in 2015, preceding the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings by four years. There are many poetic commonalities between the two books, and one might describe them as cousins, despite their significant stylistic differences. As the canon of English-translated Korean writing expands, new opportunities for a greater readership to observe and appreciate trends in confronting neoliberal identity crises, the grotesque nature of our world beyond belonging and in full transience, all the time.
In the book’s afterword, Jack Saebyok Jung writes: “Just as phantom pain continues to be felt in a limb that no longer exists, the psychic wounds in Lee’s poetry continue to shape the individual, even after the original source of pain is gone” (page 109). The book leads us through moments that reinforce this idea of an echoing, exhaustive pain, and quizzically the book leads us through many other moments as well, where the phantom emerges as humane: living, breathing, existing in its shadowy form, but perhaps filled with the fantastical notion of sentience and responsiveness. A foil, a counter, poetry as phantom emerges as a necessity. That we need its weight to lift us off the ground, that we need its terror to discover relief.
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.
