Cold Candies
Cold Candies
By Lee Young-Ju
translated by Jae Kim
Paperback / 96p. / Poetry
ISBN 978-1-939568-40-3
Cold Candies encapsulate the saccharine strangeness of a woman’s life. Fragments of narratives about girls, dolls, sisters, mothers, men, lizards, the moon, and pillows are brought together into otherworldly images that are devastating, yet familiar. Lee Young-ju is one of South Korea’s most original minds, and this collection, curated and translated by National Endowment of Arts Fellow Jae Kim, features a selection from her extraordinary body of work. These prose poems are often self-portraits, and together, they are as much an account of her life as an attempt to understand it. Pulling out threads from her past, she examines its traumas and tragedies, and unravels a haunting dreamscape of intimacy and kinship.
Lee Young-ju is the author of four poetry collections. Her work has received support from the Arts Council of Korea and the Seoul Foundation for the Arts and Culture. She is also an essayist and a playwright. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
Jae Kim is a fiction writer and a literary translator. He received his BA from Princeton University and MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he’s currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he translates contemporary South Korean poetry by women, alongside early twentieth-century works from Korean and Japanese.
PRAISE
“These poems call to mind the plays of Samuel Beckett, paintings by Francis Bacon, and films such as Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, but in the end they realize a highly original horror, one that allows the reader to observe their own anxiety as separate, an entity apart, like the various elements in Young-ju’s elaborate scenes. What these poems offer, among other things, is a chance to grapple with our estrangement from the dead: ‘We wrote eulogies to deepen your name. We wrote, shipwrecked in reality.’”
“At its core, Cold Candies is a study of the human mind, with all its surreal associations and unexcavated corners. The experience of reading is like watching the machinations of someone’s brain: witnessing the desire for destruction delicately entangled with the desire for pleasure, and the absurd imagery that surfaces when we are freed from narrative obligations.”
“Each poem, each fragment is like a cinematic seamless shot, panning across the familiar yet defamiliarized landscapes—the fabled and fated—of girls, sisters, mothers, and grandmothers.”
“What a tonic pleasure to traverse the distinctive topology of Lee Young-ju’s poetic world, in which blanket and pillow, grave and heaven form an impossibly continuous shoreline on a wondrously inverting scale. Jae Kim’s English translations render Lee’s sightlines with a deft sonority and offer a radically responsive sense of the possible.”
