Reviews

DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi

adrieee's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative reflective slow-paced

3.5

thepoptimist's review against another edition

3.0

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Korean translator Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony didn't cohere for me. The Orphan Series is a devastating account of the Sancheong–Hamyang massacre and Ahn Hak-Sop's testimony from his home in the Civilian Control Zone on the South Korean side of the DMZ is nothing short of harrowing. But then the poetic tricks of Mirror Words and whatever is happening in The Apparatus is just lost to me. The literary journals I seek out to decipher the words on the page only frustrate me more, drenched in oblique language, literary folderol and referencing an artistic tradition I'm unfamiliar with. It's like I'm missing the key that brings it all into focus, the rosetta stone that brings the language into clear focus. I don't doubt it's art - but it flew well past me.

lhegedus's review against another edition

5.0

Arguably one of the most stylistically unique collections of poetry that I’ve ever read. There were too many times to count where my reading was stopped in it’s tracks. A lot to process here, but oh so very worth it.

choi_lacroix's review against another edition

challenging dark tense slow-paced

4.25

hxvphaestion's review against another edition

5.0

this book. this book. this book.

urban_mermaid's review against another edition

I literally don’t have a way to rate this. This is a short. I would consider it more art than poetry. It has drawings, short stories, quotes, dialogue, homages to other artists. It is harrowing. It is truthful. It is a naked attempt to process and understand horror, colonialism, military might, and unspeakable acts. It is an immigrant and emigrant who at one remove can look at their homeland of origin and question and learn. Unrateable but thought provoking.

stuffymeowkins's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful sad tense slow-paced

honeyedorange's review against another edition

informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

kaileehaong's review

emotional informative medium-paced

4.0

venneh's review against another edition

4.0

As a metatextual work containing translations of survivors of civilian massacres and re-education camps during the Korean War, the author’s own reactions to a trip to the DMZ, her childhood in South Korea, and the theory of neocolonization and how it relates to the act of translation. As such, it’s dense as hell, and I will freely admit that there are parts of this that went over my head, especially in sections five and seven. But as a chapbook that works in various mediums (poems, drawings, multimedia collages, theory work), it’s a hell of an experience and has me interested both in her other chapbooks and her translation work.

-

My gut says 4 stars, but this is dense as hell and I’m gonna need to let it sit a night and then I’m gonna go back and reread it