Don Mee Choi on Feeling “Freely Frayed”

“Translation is a Political Act“ Don Mee Choi has one of the most recognizable voices in poetry today. The poems in her last three books, Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation, with their mix of English and Korean languages, their inclusion of photographs and drawings, their love of word and sound repetitions, and their frequent use of free-form shapes are immediately recognizable as hers and hers alone. Equally recognizable is her distinctive voice with its alternating modalities, from the sing-song voice of a child to the sloganeering of an anti-government protestor, from optimism to fury. Her newest book, Freely Frayed, just published today, is her first to include both poems and essays. One of the achievements of this book is that it gives us a peek into how this voice came into being. The book’s other focus is on translation, a topic inseparable from any conversation about Choi’s poetry. “When I began translating, I found myself crying again. I knew then that I had finally…