Don Mee Choi

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.

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More Info

Author: Don Mee Choi
Format: Custom
Publication date: 17 November 2026
ISBN: 9781916751613
Availability: Forthcoming
Number of pages: 114

Reviews

Annabelle Johnson
Los Angeles Review of Books, on Mirror Nation

‘Choi shifts her focus from individual linguistic dislocation to the semantics of empire. She lingers on the cyclical nature of colonial conflict, the division of history into that which can be mourned and that which must be forgotten. In plain terms she describes this phenomenon, stating, “Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony.”’