And Other Stories announces it will be publishing Freely Frayed, the new poetry and essay collection by the National Book Award-winning poet Don Mee Choi, a mainstay of a growing poetry list that also includes Deborah Levy, Kim Hyesoon, Lutz Seiler and soon Colin Bramwell
Publisher Stefan Tobler has acquired exclusive English-language rights in UK, Commonwealth (ex. Canada) and Europe from Wave Books (USA). Freely Frayed will be published on 17 November of this year, joining Colin Bramwell, And Other Stories’ first ever UK poet, whose debut collection, Fetch publishes 8 September. The publication of these two new collections sees And Other Stories’ award-winning poetry list continue to grow, following on from 2025, the year they published more poetry than ever before (five titles).
Stefan Tobler on the acquisition:
Don Mee Choi is an exhilaratingly free, unclassifiable writer, poet, thinker and artist, and I am delighted that – having already published five of her books (three of her ‘own’, two of her translations of Kim Hyesoon) in the last two years – in 2026 we can bring European and Commonwealth readers Freely Frayed: beautifully revolutionary poetry and, for the first time in book form, her vital essays.
About Don Mee Choi:
Don Mee Choi is a highly innovative poet and translator. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Her book DMZ Colony won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry while her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings won the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
About Freely Frayed:
Freely Frayed gathers early poems, recent essays and translation notes by National Book Award winning poet Don Mee Choi. Featuring Choi’s radical modes of writing back to empire, the collection offers both the underpinnings of her acclaimed KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation) and the intersecting points of personal experience and memory that have evolved during the time of writing the books. Freely Frayed grapples with the politics of distance and language in exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity, illustrating memory’s enactment of translation and a notion of salvage that creates a dialogue between forms. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place and language, and in turn to ask what history is built from this record.