Bøger i Cowles Poetry Prize Winner serien

Offers an investigation of the language used to house descriptions of the body. Written after Bolden's radical hysterectomy, these stunning poems set out to expose the fissures in the foundations of the language we use to define human bodies and their behaviours.

With attention to the Japanese occupation, the Korean War and its aftermath, these poems reflect on the sounds, ideas and histories of the Korean peninsula.

Documents the construction of a queer femme self in the hostile territory of American late capitalism. Its speaker encounters darkness - in the form of violence perpetrated by both individuals and by societal systems of power and oppression - and yet, rejects the narratives articulated by that violence, celebrating instead softness and gentleness.

This somewhat autobiographical collection of poetry focuses on the illnesses and deaths of the poet's parents during her teen years, focusing on palliative care and literal plastics: medical tools and supplies-artificial, grotesquely present, weirdly funny, sublimely comforting.

"These poems luxuriate on elegance in a way that feels entirely necessary, the way Garbo's eyes lit up the Great Depression or Julie London's voice puts you in the moods to open your flower. Kwon's casually gorgeous lines are the best thing since melted butter."--D.A. POWELL "There are poems who know the names of trees, poets who don't, and now Christine Kwon, a poet who does know the tree's name, but who pretends not to, only sharing with her readers the incredible privacy of knowing."--SOPHIA DAHLIN "Christine Kwon has a playfully no-nonsense way with the agitations of being someone's child, someone's partner, someone's poet, someone's self. 'These people inside me/ make me nervous, ' she writes, as her poems briskly and brazenly bear the tumults of inwardness. Kwon suffers no fools, but she does suffer--grief-stricken, defiant and turning to poetry for a salvation she can't quite trust. This voice is fresh, freshly wounded, clear-eyed, laid bare: 'They say when you cut into night/ There is no fat/ Only bone.'" --Mark Levine