The icon of
unhappiness, from hell.

The experiment: the language of violence inside poetry. English edition published by Open Letter Books (2021, translated by Soje). NYT review, PEN America longlist.

Three generations of women under one roof. A grandmother, a mother, a daughter — and money that travels between Alaska and Namdaemun Market. These poems are written not from those who crossed the ocean, but from the ones who stayed in Korea and waited — the ones the eagle left behind. B-side Diaspora. Five illustrations by Yeon Yeoin (poster artist for Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice) sit between the poems, because fables have always needed pictures. First interior illustrations in Moonji's 40-year history. Aladin Editor's Pick. The Korean edition is the only poetry title stocked in the Korean section at Foyles, London.

The experiment: a board game inside poetry. The dice roll through 20+ countries. A Bangladeshi mother falls from the seventh floor and the police call it suicide. A Chernobyl liquidator shovels graphite—you read his poem in 90 seconds, the time he lived. In Argentina, Diego hits Valentina because he loves her. 60% of the pieces are foreign. The game ends at Bankruptcy: fifth floor, Christmas night, 605,000 won. Translation passed through AI as a deliberate layer—to localize accents and dialects, because there is no single English in the world.

The experiment: psychiatric diagnosis inside poetry. A poet named Lee Soho is admitted to Ward 13. Each poem is a different condition in first person. Wernicke–Korsakoff confabulates murders. ADHD cannot finish a title. Dysgraphia misspells a love letter. The DSM-5 is the table of contents. Discharge is impossible. The reader becomes the next patient.

The experiment: video game code inside poetry. Korea's erased histories — comfort women, Sewol, Gwangju, forced labor — recorded as error logs, cheat codes, boss battles, and game-overs. Every victim is Lee Soho. Every level is unbeatable.

The experiment: a poem sequence on how war destroys the person, not the city. In 2187, the Crimson Empire invades New Korea. Speaker Lee Soho loses her humanity across five parts—Start, Occupation, Resistance, Collapse, Liberation. The structure is circular: the war ends, but the person never leaves it. The last poem connects to the first.

The experiment: chemistry inside poetry. The periodic table becomes a murder manual. "Perfect Crime Recipe" repeats through the collection. The title hides isotope, isomer, isotonic inside Lee Soho's name. Same name, different molecular weight.

The experiment: how far can language be destroyed before pathos stops arriving? In 2055, humans are gene-edited and sold by tier. Lee Soho is Specimen FAIL-2847—defective, marked for disposal. Poems arrive as corporate reports, C++ code, security protocols, and disposal manuals. Meaning is destroyed. Pathos survives.

The experiment: physics as the language of domestic violence. Heat death is a husband’s insurance scheme. LIGO cannot measure the grief in the next room. A rogue planet is a woman dragging a suitcase into lightless space. Every equation is a bruise. Not yet contracted in Korea — available for English-language markets first.

There is a Korean proverb: even when the rich fall, it takes three generations. This is the autofiction of the third generation that fell. There are countless stories about getting into debt. There are none about paying it back. A grandfather gutted salmon in Alaska. A grandmother traded black-market dollars at Namdaemun Gate. A mother had nothing to sell. A poet had nothing but debt. She paid back $14,000. The interest never slept. The New York chapters are written in broken English — with typography and form that break alongside the language. The novel starts at a railing and ends at the same railing. To capture the addict’s voice, the author wrote the entire draft in three nights without sleep — with her body, not her head. The ending connects to If You Call My Name, I Die — the poetry collection that ends at “Bankruptcy.” Kyoyuseoga, summer 2026.

You are lucky. You were born in a Roman alphabet country with English. This is a backpacking autofiction of a woman born into a garnish language — not a main dish, not even a side dish — too brutal to post on any feed. She was black-and-white. Her sister was color. A 340-day airline ticket, no smartphone, no translator — just a body. Every country gave her one word: the word she said most. Ssibal in India. La in Egypt. NULL in China. Sorry in New York. She never became fluent. Funny. Sometimes it’s not respect but a fight that makes something beautiful. And our translation — the one that dreamed the American Dream — was shelved in the proud Asian section. Oh right. We are Lee.

Hi, I’m an almost-pet-shop human — born by scheduled C-section, date and time handpicked by my mother. Want to hear my story? How much narrative is compressed inside one body? Head, legs, hands, back, chest, weight, mouth, stomach, bones, muscle, brain, ears, heart — each chapter strips away the violence and the living layered inside one person. Like scraping geological strata, what’s left at the end is bare bone — and bare bone turns out to be everyone’s story. It begins with someone else’s sex. The period at the end of life is mine to place. I drag this broken body through sentences like a ghost, forever. To you who consume my tragedy and sigh, “at least I’m not her” — were you really safer? Is this violence really not universal?