Kim Kyung Ju’s poetry operates in a world where no one seems to belong: “the living are born in the dead people’s world, and the dead are born in the living.” Already in its thirtieth edition in Korea, I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in the World is one of the most important books in the movement Korean critics have called Miraepa or future movement.  Destructive forces like social isolation, disease, and ecological degradation are transformed into gateways to the sublime—where human action takes on the mythic and chaotic quality of nature. Conflating human agency with the natural order, Kim’s poems have been called by critics both a blessing and a curse to Korean literature. This book will be a startling English-language debut for one of the best-known poets writing in Korean today.

Jake Levine is the author of 2 chapbooks of poetry and is an editor at Spork Press. He is from Tucson.

In his English-language debut, Korean poet and performance artist Kim calmly renders a world in which inert objects assume human traits, while humans themselves become mere traces. . . . .Several long poems weave through time and conflate temporal points, lending the collection a feeling of grander scale. Kim leaves his readers with a sense that there are bigger, more permanent things than people.

—Publishers Weekly