Kim Min Jeong is the author of 4 poetry collections and a book of
essays. Her third book of poems, Beautiful and Useless is her first to be published in English. She is the poetry editor for Korea’s largest publishing house, Munhak Dongne.

In Beautiful and Useless, Kim Min Jeong destabilizes social constructs and hierarchy by exposing the often funny and contradictory rifts that appear in the language of everyday circumstance. She uses slang, puns, cultural referents, and ‘naughty, unwomanly’ language in order to challenge readers to expand their ideas of not only what a poem is, but also how women should speak. In this way Kim undermines patriarchal authority by displaying the absurd nature of gender expectations. But even larger than issues of gender, these poems reveal the illogical systems of power behind the apparent structures
that govern the logic of everyday life. By making the source of these antagonisms and gender transgressions visible, they make them less powerful.

Poet Kim Hyesoon writes that Kim Min Jeong’s poetry exposes “a fear about the monstrous and revolting orderliness of South Korea. The coarse jabber of women who have gathered to relieve such fear is settled in it like priming powder. Therefore, the women’s everyday lives that she observes through her poetry is not a deficient or thoughtless reflection of time and space, but is where the mechanism of oppression is demystified by triviality and ridicule and through verisimilitude. It is the backyard in which language can vent.”

Soeun Seo is a poet and translator from South Korea and a current fellow at the Michener Center for Writers. They also co-translated Kim Yideum’s Hysteria (Action Books, 2019).

Jake Levine is an American translator, poet, and scholar. He received both his BA and MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently ABD in a PhD program in Comparative Literature at Seoul National University. He works as an assistant professor of creative writing at Keimyung University and as a lecturer at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. He is the editor for the Korean poetry series Moon Country at Black Ocean. Previously he served as the editor-in-chief of Sonora Review, as the poetry editor of Spork Press, and as an assistant editor at ACTA Koreana.