Kim Hyesoon
Autobiography of Death
Winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
‘I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.’
The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls ‘the structure of death, that we remain living in’. Autobiography of Death at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death – how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural ‘you’ speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with ‘Face of Rhythm’, a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
Read an Excerpt
More Info
- Kim Hyesoon spoke to The New Yorker about her approach to language.
- Kim Hyesoon read with translator Don Mee Choi at the Woodberry Poetry Room’s 2023 T.S. Eliot Memorial Reading, available to watch on the Woodberry Poetry Room’s YouTube channel.
- You can read a selection of poems from Kim Hyesoon’s 2014 collection I’m Ok, I’m Pig!, tr. Don Mee Choi, on Mercurius Magazine‘s website.
- You can find out more about Kim Hyesoon and her poetry on her website.
- You can read Kim Hyesoon’s interview with Guernica on her poetry and feminism.
- The Asian American Writers’ Workshop published reactions to Kim Hyesoon’s poetry from poets including Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson — you can read them on the Asian American Writers’ Workshop website.
- Translator Don Mee Choi gave The Poetry Society’s annual lecture in 2024, available to watch on YouTube.
Print status: Available
Author: Kim Hyesoon
Original language: Korean
Format: B format paperback
Publication date: 3 June 2025
ISBN: 9781916751286
Ebook ISBN: 9781916751293
Reviews
Publishers Weekly
‘Questions of the agency and effects of death, in both individual and mass tragedies, are central to this extraordinary collective elegy from Kim…This is Choi’s sixth masterly translation of Kim, and it fully reveals the startling architecture Kim develops to display structural horrors, individual loss, and the links between them.’
Griffin Prize Judges
‘In the grievous wake of the Sewol Ferry incident of 2014, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon composed a cycle of forty-nine poems – one for each day the dead must await reincarnation – to produce a harrowing work of shock, outrage, and veneration for the children lost to this disaster. Through Don Mee Choi’s extraordinary translations, we hear the clamorous registers of Hyesoon’s art – a transnational collision of shamanism, Modernism, and feminism – yield ‘a low note no one has ever sung before.’ That otherworldly tone may sound like life itself, the poet sings, “for even death can’t enter this deep inside me.”’
The Kenyon Review
‘Living through the military dictatorships and uprisings of South Korea’s post-war period, and writing from a present marked by continued corruption among society’s highest ranks, Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death addresses and gives voice to the swirling and incalculable mass of those whose lives were ended unjustly.’
Lotte L.S.
Ploughshares
‘By being “of” and not “about” death, Autobiography of Death recognizes both individual and collective involvement in the structure of death – unable to unstick itself from the structure of power.’
The Arkansas International
‘In forty-nine poems, each representing a day, Kim captures death’s cycle between life and reincarnation: pages filled with wings and shadows, female laughter and weeping, bloody rabbits and dead mothers.’
Blake Butler
Vice
‘The limits of creativity here are so wide that very quickly we find we’ve fallen through the holes old wars blew open, into something like the endless dreams of millions dead.’
Bookforum
‘Kim is a singular poet in Korea, just as she is in America, but we can only fully appreciate this when we see that, for her, violence is not the end but a means.’
