Phantom Pain Wings – Kim Hyesoon

Tr. from the Korean by Don Mee Choi

[New Directions; 2023]

If loss is a small hammer veining an otherwise intact shell, then grief is what shatters that shell into pieces in Kim Hyesoon’s complex collection Phantom Pain Wings. Begun in response to the dislocation Kim felt upon her father’s death, Phantom Pain Wings encapsulates the utter deformation Kim experiences when her mother dies soon thereafter. A bird voice appears, externally and internally, and Kim moves between translator and container in poem after poem where, as Kim says in “Bird Rider,” her conclusionary essay, “Bird is a mechanism that subjectifies the gaps. Bird is a subject in process, making me give birth to the dead.” Bird carries pieces of Kim in her grief just as bird is Kim in her grief, talisman, doppelgänger, other. The close proximity of her parents’ deaths triggers illness and a mental breakdown, and Phantom Pain Wings explores the duality of bird and Kim from dark depths to enormous heights.

Divided into four sections, the poems included in Phantom Pain Wings cover immense ground, shifting in style and focus as well as form. While the majority of the collection’s poems are two or three pages long, even longer multi-page poems like “Tyrannus Melancholicus” are in evidence alongside a few shorter works. The book’s third section, “Community of Parting,” in which Kim’s father’s hospitalization and death takes a central role, is presented more like a single work than individual poems despite each poem’s obvious title. Here, the poems nearly run into each other, each given no more than four spaces between one poem’s end and another’s beginning, rather than the more traditional break wherein each poem starts at the top of a page. Without the poems being printed in Korean as well (likely a sensible decision based on Phantom Pain Wings’ length, but still unfortunate), I only guess at this intentional cascade where Kim’s deep grief has its beginnings and where, in “Bird’s Diary,” Kim clearly states, “Daddy, I become bird in the room where you died.” What breath exists between poems in this section is short and shallow, not unlike the gasps of breath taken between sobs.

The breath points within a poem seem to be an important aspect of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry. Many of the poems in this collection employ long lines stretching across a page width, which occasionally give rise to prose poems or prose-like sections in longer works. Take, for instance, “Little Poem,” a prose poem comprised of single-sentence stanzas, and consider the time and space given to the speaker’s ability to inhale:

Once upon a time there lived a big story and a little story.

The little story was so little that it was as tiny as a dog the size of an ant, tiny enough to flee through its collar, and so little was the story that it also cooked, washed dishes, and lived on a chipped plate, and its house was so small that the toilet backed up and the glacier melted and the youthful you trapped inside the black-and-white photo for decades floated by—that’s how little the little story was.

. . .

The little story is so little that even though it thinks it is speaking, it’s the same as not speaking at all.

The poem’s narrator is a rush and awash, image upon image pulled into the miniature orbit the poem creates. Language itself is part of the pull and play here, and in so many other of this collection’s poems:

There’s only the word clean but no kleen, keen, cleat, cleek, cloot, clat, clot, so I have no idea what I’m cleaning with the little story—only shhit shhit shhit.

I’ll take this moment to note the incredibly helpful Translator’s Diary included at the end of Phantom Pain Wings, in which Don Mee Choi offers many insights, including how Kim “creates a wordplay by listing a string of words that sound similar to “clean,” which sounds similar to “shit” in English . . . This translingual wordplay does indeed change the meaning of clean to ‘shhit,’ but not the larger meaning or tone of the poem.”

While Kim’s poems are rarely built entirely on short lines, when employed, the shorter lines do add punctuation and a place to breathe amid the flow of her work, sometimes even to one consonant, as seen in “P— P—”:

My vibrant hair loosens itself on the two rails for five minutes straight

Icelandic glacier comes into my embrace

whimpering

p—

p—

Perhaps my own need for breath is what prompted me to take note of so many of Kim’s shorter lines, which are often vivid and emotionally powerful, as seen in an early poem, “Inside-Bird and Outside-Bird”:

From up in the air I can see

you and me walking

as if I were looking at the fish

trapped beneath the ice

One of the collection’s later poems, “Isn’t That Photo Black and White,” also employs shorter lines effectively in the poem’s opening stanza:

Shave the head of the runaway moon

tie its ankles, put it in a birdcage

then feed it and nurture it daily

After the moon is all grown

unwind its body

so it can weave a shroud for me,

said Daddy

These lines serve as important contrasts to the mountainous landscape and increasing line length found later in the poem. While the moon sits in a birdcage, Kim stands “next to the window and play[s] the game of getting bigger all day long”—as in so many of the poems in Phantom Pain Wings, grief is something you attempt to shrink and contain while simultaneously being something that is nearly too big to traverse.

In all this, I have avoided talking in depth about Bird, a narrator outside of Kim and yet entirely of Kim and Kim’s voice, or how “bird = I” itself has a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints, emotions and intentions that layer themselves so deeply a reader can only flow across the surface of Kim’s poetry in a first reading. I have not mentioned Kim’s repetition of phrases, where ideas are considered and reconsidered from multiple angles, nor her repetition of colors, largely white and red but also some blues and yellows, nor her copious calling toward bird imagery to grapple with heightened emotions. I have barely mentioned her parents, whose presence looms throughout the collection, nor her consideration of writing itself, nor her pointed examination of women’s roles within Korea, nor her own self-examination. To adequately address all the complexities of Phantom Pain Wings would require significantly more space than a review allows, and I anticipate scholars’ responses to Kim’s prodigious work.

Phantom Pain Wings is not an easy collection—Kim Hyesoon is a poet of ambition. But the collection is a cache of value and meaning worth the effort it takes to open. Kim and Choi, in their conclusionary materials, offer keys to entering this incredible mind and body of work, and those who relish the challenge of multiple readings will be rewarded for their time and consideration. 

Lisa Higgs is a recipient of a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She has published three chapbooks, most recently Earthen Bound (Red Bird). Her reviews and interviews can be found online at the Poetry Foundation, Kenyon Review, the Adroit Journal, and the Colorado Review.