[KS] thank you

[SujiKwockKim at cs.com]

Dear Korean Studies Listserv:

Thanks so much to everyone who responded to my query last fall,  regarding 
suggestions for a cover that might be suitable for a book called NOTES FROM 
THE DIVIDED COUNTRY.  

I wanted to invite those of you who might be in the Bay Area next week,  or 
in NY the last week of May,  to some events of particular interest to those 
teaching poetry:   


FRIDAY MAY 9,  12 pm:  Marilyn Chin,  Garrett Hongo and Suji Kwock Kim read 
at the Association of Asian American Studies Conference,  at the Cathedral 
Hill Hotel,  1101 Van Ness (between Post & Geary), "Café APA"/ El Dorado 
room,  mezzanine level (2nd floor),  San Francisco.  Tel: (415) 776-8200.

SATURDAY MAY 10,  5pm:  Marilyn Chin and Suji Kwock Kim read at the Cathedral 
Hill Hotel,  1101 Van Ness (between Post & Geary),  "Café APA"/ El Dorado 
room,  mezzanine level (2nd floor),  San Francisco.  Tel: (415) 776-8200.

SUNDAY MAY 11,  3 pm:  UC Berkeley professor and editor Elaine Kim,  and 
contributors Sasha Hom,  Junse Kim,  and Suji Kwock Kim read from the new 
anthology of Korean American writings,  ECHOES UPON ECHOES (Asian American 
Writers' Workshop/ Temple University Press),  Eastwind Books,  Berkeley.  
Tel: (510) 548-2350.

TUESDAY MAY 13,  7pm:  Rick Barot,  Suji Kwock Kim,  David Yezzi and Monica 
Youn read from their first books of poems,  at Stanford University Bookstore, 
 Palo Alto.  Tel:  (650) 725-1208.

**THURSDAY,  MAY 29,  7:30pm:  Please join Edward Hirsch,  President of the 
Guggenheim Foundation and MacArthur Fellow in poetry,  and Suji Kwock Kim,  
at Teachers & Writers Collaborative,  5 Union Square West (between 14th & 
15th Streets),  7th Floor.  Book launch party to follow,  location TBA.


Please pass along this information to anyone who might be interested,  and 
please forgive the multiple announcements,  if you've received this more than 
once!

Cheers,  

Suji Kwock Kim
Assistant Professor,  Drew University
www.poets.org/skkim

________________
 
from the LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW,  April 27, 2003:

"I wish I had space in which to consider at length the important debut of 
NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY by Suji Kwock Kim.  It seems to me that this 
first book (already acknowledged by the 2002 Walt Whitman Award) deserves 
close and celebratory attention.

Suji Kwock Kim has written a book of unforgettable poems;  she has found a 
way, through the medium of language, to allow readers into a double 
consciousness that is,  finally,  the poet's undivided mind.  She writes of 
the "old country" reborn in the New World,  of her ancestors in Korea during 
the Japanese occupation and her immediate family in America:  the Trees of 
Unknowing and Knowledge. 

In one of the most inspired and brilliant poems,  she considers sparrows and 
their symbology:  "How to stay faithful / to earth, how to keep from 
betraying / its music " she wonders,  as she writes of the Earth that both 
divides us and brings us together." --- CAROL MUSKE-DUKES

________________


from BOOKLIST,  April 1, 2003:

"The four parts of Ms. Kim's impressive first collection contain poems of 
family, history, love, and vision, respectively.  The first part is 
punch-in-the-guts powerful. After opening with the virtuosic "Generation," 
tracing the poet's journey from before conception to implantation in the 
womb, the poems lay out a painful familial scenario, the soul-searing climax 
of which comes in "ST RAGE," in which sadistic boys torment the poet's 
handicapped brother. Anguish also pervades the second section's preoccupation 
with the half-century of horror Ms. Kim's ancestral homeland, Korea, endured, 
first under Japanese occupation, then in the Korean War; members of Ms. Kim's 
family played historic roles then, and they figure as actors and dedicatees 
here. The third section's poems on love are analytic, personal, and sensual, 
though seldom all at once; whereas pain predominated in the first two 
sections, emotional intensity preoccupies these poems. In the last section, 
Ms. Kim applies that intensity to observation of art and nature, so 
strikingly that, for instance, having read "On Sparrows," you may never 
regard those common birds as commonplace again." --- RAY OLSON