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    What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?: Poems
    What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?: Poems
    What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?: Poems
    Ebook98 pages53 minutes

    What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?: Poems

    By Arlene Kim

    4.5/5

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    • Nature

    • Time

    • Literature

    • Poetry

    • Family & Relationships

    • Coming of Age

    • Power of Language

    • Love Triangle

    • Family Secrets

    • Time Travel

    • Quest

    • Haunted House

    • Lost World

    • Widowhood

    • Lost Princess

    • Love

    • Memory

    • War

    • Identity

    • Book Publishing

    About this ebook

    This debut poetry collection blends fairy tales with Korean folklore as it examines the experience of immigration and identity.

    In her stunning debut poetry collection, What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?, Arlene Kim confronts the ways in which language mythologizes memory and thus exiles us from our own true histories. Juxtaposing formal choices and dreamlike details, Kim explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration—the abandoned country known only through stories, the new country into which the immigrant family must wander ever deeper, and the forked paths where these narratives meet and diverge.

    Sharing ground with Randall Jarrell’s later poems, and drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, Turkish proverbs, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Antonin Dvorak’s letters, and the numerous fictions we script across the inscrutabilities of the natural world—Kim reveals how a homesickness for the self is universal. It is this persistent and incurable longing that drives us as we make our way through the dark woods of our lives, following what might or might not be a trail of breadcrumbs, discovering, finally, that “we are the only path.”

    Winner of the 2012 American Book Award

    Praise for What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?

    “Using fairy tale archetypes like axes and keys, and diverse cultural references—from the Romanovs and code ciphers to Korean birth rituals—Arlene Kim recasts the experience of family immigration in language that manages to be both lush and restrained. This is a book to savor, give your friends, and let echo in your ears for a long time to come.” —Katrina Vandenberg, author of Atlas

    “In this young century, American writing has rapidly changed and the impact of this book proves Arlene Kim is a part of this exciting transformation. Her poetry and prose challenge the concept of genre as they redefine the role of the imagination.” —Ray Gonzalez, author of Muy Macho
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 12, 2011
    ISBN9781571318374
    What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?: Poems

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      Book preview

      What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? - Arlene Kim

      001

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Rot

      Spindle

      One of Us

      The Scar

      Bird Call

      Rib

      Needle

      Reasons We Left

      Answers to the Proust Questionnaire

      Season of Frogs

      Hollow Tongue

      I’m Sorry, Father, for Losing the Key

      Spool, Book, Coin

      Verna

      Once, I Held Time

      Exhibit A: Archive

      Wilderness

      Translation Plundered

      Tiger-Brother

      Release, Catch

      What Lies in the Rest of the Wood

      Before the Fires

      Rabbit Song

      Tracking

      The Squirrel

      When Thunder, Then What

      Wind

      Paper Suns

      Turtle-Sister

      Litany for Common Horses

      No Gondolier

      Echo

      North Was Not the Way

      The Collecting

      Among Monarchs

      Song

      Mountains

      Wolf-Fruit, Rind

      Curse

      Occupation

      the path come apart

      Legend

      Hunt, Peck

      The Cutting

      Acknowledgments

      Notes

      More Poetry from Milkweed Editions

      Milkweed Editions

      Copyright Page

      for LB

      "Now wake up it’s time to eat! Show me your tongue, my sweet …

      Boil her down to bone."

      Rot

      Begin

      An apple. Experts agree that it starts with an apple.

      *

      * *

      Lesson

      For beginning metaphysicists and people of color

      A person walks into a room. In this particular story, there is a table in the middle of the room. A tempting red apple sits on the table. The person sees red, sees just the skin of apple—not the flesh, or the seeds, or the table, or even the room. And certainly not the story. Not yet. The apple is of color. The person is of color. The apple has the property of redness. The person has the property of color. Apples can have redness, but redness can’t have apples. And people—people can have color (and apples and stories), but mostly color has people.

      * * *

      The Seed

      It’s evening in the 1700s. Korea (Mother tells me). Palace girls gather in their nightclothes and pass peaches. Something’s too sweet, soft. Someone strokes the peach hair—small, blushing head. It shimmers. The fuzz makes her stomach turn. Sometimes she craves, sometimes she sickens. Tonight, she craves. (The secret is this: the peaches are wild with worms. The secret is this: suck rot for beauty.) Such girlish secrets worms plunder from every aging heart. Pray tomorrow she’s not pocked with years like a pit. Fatten pretty on each fleshy grub; thieve from the graveyard’s hearty worker. Harder to see than swallow, she blows the candles out whhhhhhhhhhh the sound, too soft, sweet. She sickens, swallows.

      * * * *

      Never, Never

      The apple is red. Reddening. The peaches are ripe. Ripening. They progress—imperfect; ongoing; they do not rot. They do not ever rot.

      Spindle

      I am a nickel of girlhood gone,

      spun feverfew once in my pouch

      with foxtail and thistledown robbed from the finches. And you

      stood with me too, gathering the world then, our song

      collective. We were sister thieves. We were

      a siege of bitterns, a deceit of lapwings, a quarrel, a filth,

      a

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