DMZ Colony
DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi, published by Wave Books in 2020, is a thought-provoking exploration of the impacts of war and colonization. This edition, comprising 132 pages, presents a unique blend of poems, prose, photographs, and drawings that reflect on the intertwined histories of South Korea and the United States. Choi’s work captures the complexities of identity and memory, inviting readers to engage with the narratives shaped by historical events.
In DMZ Colony, Choi employs translation as a poetic device to navigate the borders of language and history. The book is structured into eight acts, each revealing survivor accounts and artistic expressions that highlight the experiences of those affected by conflict. Through its innovative use of voice and storytelling, the work addresses themes of history, resistance, and the human condition, making it a significant contribution to literary collections and essays on American and Asian American experiences.
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WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
“Don Mee Choi’s urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but ‘during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.’ Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all ‘victims of History, ‘ so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.”–Judges Citation
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said’s notion of “the intertwined and overlapping histories” in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
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