Freely Frayed

By Don Mee Choi

• Description
• Reviews

• Freely Frayed gathers early poems, recent essays, and translation notes by National Book Award winning poet Don Mee Choi.  Featuring Choi’s radical modes of writing back to empire, the collection offers both the underpinnings of her acclaimed KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation) and the intersecting points of personal experience and memory that have evolved during the time of writing the books. Freely Frayed grapples with the politics of distance and language in exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity, illustrating memory’s enactment of translation and a notion of salvage that creates a dialogue between forms. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place and language, and in turn to ask what history is built from this record.

   

   

  
  

• Previous Praise:
  Choi’s transnational puns are the funhouse mirror to the multinational Mercedes-Benz corporation’s rotating logo at the top of the Europa Center in Berlin, which she sees illuminated at dawn from her window.
  Alan Gilbert, e-flux Journal
  

  From Ethiopia to Israel, Nicaragua to Afghanistan, she ties headlines and fragments using the equal sign, which she refers to as “a syntax that enables multiple places and times to coexist simultaneously.” Choi skillfully illustrates the cyclical, endless nature of violence to more deeply understand her home, herself, and the world.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  To read the work of Don Mee Choi is to readjust our vision— not only of the modern world at war and violence sustained at borders, but also of how war and borders shape our language and percolate into the art that we see. Her poetry is one that will not be confined within the margins of a book, but spill into drawings, photographs, videos, and passports.
  Sohini Basak, Wasafiri
  

  Beckman wistfully takes to the road and does the incredible work of writing poems full of desire, for a world in the midst of radical upheaval.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  Choi’s hybrid structure allows her, in some sense, to have it both ways—to look at her subjects while simultaneously, and paradoxically, showing that some subjects are just too big to see in full: war, your parents’ life before and without you, your government and its decisions.
  Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
  
  Formally, Don Mee Choi is an inheritor of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose seminal Dictee (1982) has had a major impact on contemporary innovative American poetry. Yet Choi innovates on Cha’s decades-old example. Choi’s work releases new-media energy; it moves at fiber optic speed as it to struggles to find terms for our 21st century experience of globalized media, especially as such media affects our sense of history, commodity, violence, politics, terror, and freedom.
  Joyelle McSweeney, Montevidayo