OSSIA
by Jimin Seo
This edition of OSSIA is published exclusively by the87press for readers in the UK and Ireland, please visit Changes Press for everywhere else.
In this extraordinary, passionate debut poetry collection, Jimin Seo takes up a material we think we recognize – language – and transforms it through permutation, history, and translation into a lyrical and alien terrain. Seo takes up both Korean and English, drawing them across multiple experiences of relation – none of them equivalence. Translation and re-translation triangulate to form the ghostly third other which defines every relationship of two. Fragmentation, riff, homophony, and analogy sprawl like cuttings from a plant, yielding poems that grow in defiant new directions. This is a book calling to a mother, a teacher, lovers, and ultimately a self whose elements materialise through language, even as the speaker laments what language cannot be or hold.
by Jimin Seo
This edition of OSSIA is published exclusively by the87press for readers in the UK and Ireland, please visit Changes Press for everywhere else.
In this extraordinary, passionate debut poetry collection, Jimin Seo takes up a material we think we recognize – language – and transforms it through permutation, history, and translation into a lyrical and alien terrain. Seo takes up both Korean and English, drawing them across multiple experiences of relation – none of them equivalence. Translation and re-translation triangulate to form the ghostly third other which defines every relationship of two. Fragmentation, riff, homophony, and analogy sprawl like cuttings from a plant, yielding poems that grow in defiant new directions. This is a book calling to a mother, a teacher, lovers, and ultimately a self whose elements materialise through language, even as the speaker laments what language cannot be or hold.
by Jimin Seo
This edition of OSSIA is published exclusively by the87press for readers in the UK and Ireland, please visit Changes Press for everywhere else.
In this extraordinary, passionate debut poetry collection, Jimin Seo takes up a material we think we recognize – language – and transforms it through permutation, history, and translation into a lyrical and alien terrain. Seo takes up both Korean and English, drawing them across multiple experiences of relation – none of them equivalence. Translation and re-translation triangulate to form the ghostly third other which defines every relationship of two. Fragmentation, riff, homophony, and analogy sprawl like cuttings from a plant, yielding poems that grow in defiant new directions. This is a book calling to a mother, a teacher, lovers, and ultimately a self whose elements materialise through language, even as the speaker laments what language cannot be or hold.
ISBN: 9781068644627
130 pages
Date published: 16/11/2024
Paperback
For Fans of: Kim Hyesoon, Ocean Vuong, Jay Gao
In Jimin Seo’s debut collection OSSIA, the lyric catches between the art of living and the living of art. Vibrant poems oscillate between languages and queer intimacies, that erotic and operatic space between there and—after a breath—there again. –Jay Gao, author of Imperium
OSSIA is thrillingly alive. There’s an inventive daring at work in the lines that feels at times like a song, at times like the voice in your head, telling you about yourself and others, everything you do and don’t want to know. One part intimate self-regard, one part provocation, this lyric extension of a conversation between friends, between mentor and mentee, the living and the dead, lover and beloved, pursues a series of renewals as the poet offers the poems in Korean and English, hoping to include all of the registers of his feelings. The result is a gorgeous game of language and poetry, conducted for the highest stakes: love. –Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Jimin Seo was born in Seoul, Korea and immigrated to the US to join his family at the age of eight. He is the author of OSSIA, winner of The Changes Book Prize. His poems can be found in Action Fokus, The Canary, annulet, Pleiades, mercury firs, and The Bronx Museum. His most recent projects were Poems of Consumption with H. Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London, and a site activation for salazarsequeromedina's Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.
