Juyon Lee’s work plays with light and distance.

“It feels like you have crossed a river you cannot cross back again”

Snapshots from a South Korean dissident poet

The hagwon director was the most successful woman we knew at the time… Her short hair was perfectly coiffed, her full lips painted red like a Western woman’s.

“The ecology and economy of the region is under threat. This Transpacific Literary Project folio, Monsoon Notebook is for these essential, vanishing, and unruly waters.”

“I would see thousands of people streaming from their officetels to Gangnam station, all very young, very self-possessed, very confident. I was imagining how everyone living in these officetels is very far from home.”

My child, we all become white-haired soon enough.

Nobody can stop things if they want to go back to their roots.

‘The signs were like a collective raft, keeping them afloat as they waited on responses to their calls of distress.’

‘In my favorite fiction about us, I would see you and some bell within me would toll—the way an elephant will walk over the bones of its own kind, know it instantly, and fall down and mourn. Instead, I looked away. What struck me was not like lightning or love, and so I wept.’

“I didn’t care whether they understood me, then I said, ‘Hello, hello,’ again, soldiers climbed out of their foxholes and looked at me, they couldn’t understand, but they knew where I came from, they just looked at me”

How scared God must have been / when the woman who ate all the fruit of the tree he’d planted / was cutting out each red body from / between her legs

Viral vid ‘Gangnam Style’ critiques Korea’s extreme inequality.

A defender of traditional Korean arts refuses to give up.