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A review by dreesreads
Hardly War by Don Mee Choi
2.0
This poetry collection is the predecessor to Choi's DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 NBA for Poetry.
The themes in the two books are similar--war, her father's work as a South Korean photojournalist in Korea and for Korea during the Vietnam War. And this one started off in a promising way, mocking news reports (American? Korean?) that considered the Korean War (and maybe the Vietnam War too?) as being "hardly war".
But I did not enjoy this one nearly as much. Again there is untranslated Korean which is only briefly explained in the notes, and there are puns using numbers--which are puns in Korean, not English. But there are a LOT of flowers mentioned here. Flowers edited into photos as leaders' faces. A mention that her father only photographs flowers now (is this true?).
There are no red hydrangeas, so what does a red hydrangea represent? Azaleas, daisies, crocuses, rose of Sharon (which is mentioned as being South Korea's national flower, I think?), fosythias, and more. I know what these flowers look like, but I really didn't understand what Choi was getting at. (Traditional meanings (in what tradition?)? Wordplay in Korean? Do all these flowers references make sense if you are Korean? Korean American? Well-read in poetry?
I think this one pretty much went over my head.
The themes in the two books are similar--war, her father's work as a South Korean photojournalist in Korea and for Korea during the Vietnam War. And this one started off in a promising way, mocking news reports (American? Korean?) that considered the Korean War (and maybe the Vietnam War too?) as being "hardly war".
But I did not enjoy this one nearly as much. Again there is untranslated Korean which is only briefly explained in the notes, and there are puns using numbers--which are puns in Korean, not English. But there are a LOT of flowers mentioned here. Flowers edited into photos as leaders' faces. A mention that her father only photographs flowers now (is this true?).
There are no red hydrangeas, so what does a red hydrangea represent? Azaleas, daisies, crocuses, rose of Sharon (which is mentioned as being South Korea's national flower, I think?), fosythias, and more. I know what these flowers look like, but I really didn't understand what Choi was getting at. (Traditional meanings (in what tradition?)? Wordplay in Korean? Do all these flowers references make sense if you are Korean? Korean American? Well-read in poetry?
I think this one pretty much went over my head.