The dead draw the living toward new language in Jimin Seoâs extraordinary debut poetry collection, OSSIA. Writing across Korean and English in poems that span a breadth of forms, Seo renders an entirely original map of the voice in its shifting address to a range of ghostly figures: his mother; old lovers; his late friend and mentor, the legendary poet-translator Richard Howard. Taking the cleaving mechanism of translation as a point of departure (âossiaâ means âor ratherâ and is used to indicate an alternative way of playing a passage in a musical score), Seoâs intricate, polyvocal...
The dead draw the living toward new language in Jimin Seoâs extraordinary debut poetry collection, OSSIA. Writing across Korean and English in poems ...