Youna Kwak was born in Seoul, Korea. She has lived in Maryland, Montana, Providence, and Paris, and now is a poet and translator living in Brooklyn, New York. Her poems and translations have appeared in journals includingThe Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Horizon Review, Left-Facing Bird, Muthafucka, Neo, and Po&sie. She teaches in the French department at New York University, […]
Youna Kwak reads one of her favorite poems, Robert Duncan’s, “A Song from the Structures of Rime Ringing as the Poet Paul Celan Sings.”
Youna Kwak reads from the Brandon Shimoda poem “Trinity, Nuetrality, the Draft”; and from Don Mee Choi’s poem “The Morning News is Exciting!”
Youna Kwak was born in Seoul, Korea. She has lived in Maryland, Montana, Providence, and Paris, and now is a poet and translator living in Brooklyn, New York. Her poems and translations have appeared in journals including The Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Horizon Review, Left-Facing Bird, Muthafucka, Neo, and Po&sie. She teaches in […]
Improbable ease in the interior of things while in the exterior gleams taut as stretched muscle. In the interior a coke-bottle smoothness. A pair of robins and no dispute. The world refracted through a glass pin. Violence as a storm that took us but inside oceans unbroken, only stippled with white. Like glimpsing your enemy […]
You say the world disappoints me. You say I am disappointed by the world. The world is no feather to my plucking. Lighting strikes elsewhere but the light it makes is ours. You say we should no longer speak but live as companionable animals. Speech gone, nullified. You say there is a closeness dimmed by […]
Alive on the branch figs are heavy with water But when fallen disappear into mulch Taut like skin or topsoil, gravitational brush At meadows’ border under the cool white slab Of salt collected as in the bottom of the crispcurl Of aurous new sage, of grass-newness and afternoon A burlap sack bulging where auroras meet […]