The Morning News Is Exciting
by Don Mee Choi
Poetry. Asian American Studies. Korean Studies.
ISBN: 9780979975561
1 June 2010
$16
“In this first book of poems, Don Mee Choi takes on a fearless exploration of self, family, community, and global identities. Choi, a translator of Korean poetry, employs acts of translation throughout this collection, deftly complicating assigned or assumed experiences and outcomes.”
“Choi is often striving to resolve the difference between colony and home, wanted and unwanted, woman and nation, by interacting with “invader” texts, which are noted at the end of every poem: Foucault, Spivak, folktales, Dickinson, etc. The Morning News Is Exciting refuses to be either assimilated or impermeable and integrates these speakers into its collage of loss.”
– Sarah Louise Green, Jacket2
“Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting blends provocative politics with urgent writing, it moves beyond the pretty sentence, it is a book with purpose, with a point.”
– Lily Hoang, HTML Giant
“‘Cameraman, run to my twin twin zone. A girl’s exile excels beyond excess. Essence excels exile. Something happens to the wanted girl. Nothing happens to the unwanted girl. The morning news is exciting.’ A debut volume from poet, translator, artist and activist Don Mee Choi. Here translation, aberration, mobility and movement corrupt the would-be verities of the world’s hegemonic codes. Choi translates feminist politics into an experimental poetry that demilitarizes, deconstructs, and decolonizes any master narrative.”
– Craig Santos Perez
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, April 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and translator of contemporary Korean women poets. She has received a Whiting Writers Award and the 2012 Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her translation of Kim Hyesoon’s Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (Action Books, 2014) was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. Her most recent works include a chapbook, Petite Manifesto (Vagabond Press, 2014), and a pamphlet, Freely Frayed,ㅋ=q, Race=Nation (Wave Books, 2014). She was born in Seoul and came to the U.S. via Hong Kong. She now lives in Seattle.