Dance Dance Revolution: Poems, (Paperback)

Publishers Weekly,This deeply political Barnard Women Poets Prize-winning second book is part poetic sequence, part science fiction: in a future city called the Desert-a Vegas-like manmade tourist trap-a character called the Guide shows another, the Historian, the sights. The Guide has survived the historical Kwangju uprising, a 1980 massacre of students and other prodemocracy protesters by the American-backed South Korean dictatorship. The Guide's speeches-all in verse-turn repeatedly to her own life story, detailed in a superbly invented dialect, based on English but incorporating Spanish and Jamaican patois: "I'mma double migrant," the Guide says. "Ceded from Koryo [Korea], "ceded from/ Merikka." The "Dance Dance Revolution" the Guide has seen-described, vaguely, late (perhaps too late) in the book, and named for, but supposedly unrelated to, the popular video game-thus becomes "Kwangju Replayed," another failed attempt to destroy an undemocratic capitalist system. The Historian's own reflective autobiography, presented in a terse, melodic prose, brings in other examples of global horrors (Sierra Leonean amputees) as it mirrors a reader's own unease. Hong's earlier treatment of Korean-American themes in Translating Mo'um attracted some attention, but nothing could have predicted this admittedly flawed but highly original work: hard to excerpt, hard at times to decode, it's even harder to forget. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved,Publishers Weekly,Publishers Weekly,This deeply political Barnard Women Poets Prize-winning second book is part poetic sequence, part science fiction: in a future city called the Desert-a Vegas-like manmade tourist trap-a character called the Guide shows another, the Historian, the sights. The Guide has survived the historical Kwangju uprising, a 1980 massacre of students and other prodemocracy protesters by the American-backed South Korean dictatorship. The Guide's speeches-all in verse-turn repeatedly to her own life story, detailed in a superbly invented dialect, based on English but incorporating Spanish and Jamaican patois: "I'mma double migrant," the Guide says. "Ceded from Koryo [Korea], "ceded from/ Merikka." The "Dance Dance Revolution" the Guide has seen-described, vaguely, late (perhaps too late) in the book, and named for, but supposedly unrelated to, the popular video game-thus becomes "Kwangju Replayed," another failed attempt to destroy an undemocratic capitalist system. The Historian's own reflective autobiography, presented in a terse, melodic prose, brings in other examples of global horrors (Sierra Leonean amputees) as it mirrors a reader's own unease. Hong's earlier treatment of Korean-American themes in Translating Mo'um attracted some attention, but nothing could have predicted this admittedly flawed but highly original work: hard to excerpt, hard at times to decode, it's even harder to forget. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved