Poetry: “무인도” by Angela Sim
Sim’s use of the characters in the title of her poem are contributing to an ongoing debate in the world of contemporary poetry, and particularly concerning Asian and Asian-American poets. Writers like Cathy Linh Che were some of the first writers to use characters in their poems (she talks about it in this interview from The Rumpus) and Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning is also a book considered a pioneer when considering writers who do not translate. Chen Chen is inspired by these examples; Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense has characters, though this may be more closely related to historical accuracy, as the book is thematically based around the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Chen makes the excellent point in his interview with Gasher that it’s possible to google a character nowadays, so any talk about accessibility is pretty thin. The characters, translated, mean “desert island” if Google Translate knows anything.
무인도
in an afterlife, a stone
is rubbed on a forehead
a million times
until the skin becomes a
second heart
resting beneath the eyes—
when did the heavens
harbor a home
in my mind like rifles
of the streets in Seoul
waiting for river blood, hands
clenched before my
invisible lungs?
On December 3rd, 2024, South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, throwing the country into chaos. The order was lifted in six hours.
Angela Sim
Angela Sim (she/her) is a Korean-American writer with work forthcoming or published in ANMLY, Hobart, Antiphony, The Inflectionist Review, and more. She attends George Mason University.
