Hardly War
- £14.99
- Pre-order
- Paperback scheduled for publication on 06/03/2025
- Page count: 128 pages
- ISBN: 9781916751231
Synopsis
Flowers and massacres, opera and tanks: In Choi’s long-awaited UK debut, her genre-defying writing splices the personal and the political, using her family’s story and her father’s photos of war and state violence in her passionate defiance of imperialism.
Hardly War, first published in the USA in 2016 and finally published in the UK in 2025, splices the personal and political to dizzying effect in a poetry fluid with forms and genres including reportage, memoir, opera libretto, archival photos and drawings. Using artefacts from Choi’s father, a professional documentary photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she explores her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.
Choi’s KOR-US Trilogy (Hardly War and the subsequent DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation) brings us a new poetic language to learn. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship.
About the author
Don Mee Choi is a highly innovative poet and a translator. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Her book DMZ Colony won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry while her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings won the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
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More books published by & Other Stories Press
And Other Stories publishes mainly contemporary writing, including many translations. Their books aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing.
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