Annie Kim
Winner of the听2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize
Every history has its holes, every landscape its vanishing point. Fathers and brothers disappear. A bronze听helmet winds across centuries from Olympia to Berlin to Seoul. Fish bones turn to thorns in the native听tongue. In these poems that explore identity, family, and the hunger to know what can鈥檛 be known, we听discover both vividly recreated scenes and the rips in the canvas. We enter works like the 19th-century听Gettysburg Cyclorama at the heart of this book, asking: What art can we make out of violence? What听shape from loss? Like snow that leaves no trace in the photographed garden, Into the Cyclorama听answers:听Form is everything,听even at its most transient.
"At the heart of Annie Kim鈥檚 work are questions of vision and scale. How is the personal refracted through the historical? How is the present substantiated by the past? In poems that are as exact as they are charged, Kim faces her questions with 'the kind of love / that is attention mainly.' And far from claiming sure answers for questions that are necessary but mutable, Into the听Cyclorama听instead brings its reader deep into seeing, thinking, and making鈥攄eep into the processes that make us who we are. 'Incompletion means I鈥檒l live,' declares one of the speakers in Kim鈥檚 poems, highlighting the fierceness to know鈥攏ot to mention the heartbreak and bliss鈥攖hat defines this powerful debut collection." 听 听 听听
-Rick Barot
"Immersive, inclusive, encircling, a cyclorama gives us a 360 [degree symbol] view of things.听 Annie Kim鈥檚 wonderful first book, Into the听Cyclorama, is equally embracing, equally attuned. She can pan across points of view as well as points of origin, from the Greek ode to the traditional Korean lyric sijo, as her formal dexterity finds shape in both the solo voice and choral harmonies, in etude as well as rag. Each poem is beautifully distinctive鈥攚hether long or short, serial or singular, plain or as intricately shaped as a fractal or a fugue. Throughout, Kim鈥檚 complex narrative skill depicts a self, a family, and the myriad 'hidden strings' of cultural identity formed by this poet鈥檚 panoramic and symphonic sense of history."听
-David Baker
"As a cyclorama allows us to 'step inside the painting,' this debut collection by Annie Kim allows us to inhabit 'the bliss and the shame' of a life tensed between cultures, Korean and American, and to live inside the language woven to reconcile them. 'You see what happens / when I look. I turn one thing / into another, I invent / my brand of clarity.' Clarity remains constant in poems that evoke and question familial and historical destiny, and that come to recognize how 'imperfection takes the shape you love.' Through its own modest imperfections and with uncommon depths of feeling, Into the听Cyclorama locates 'the garden of your dreams, the dirt of dreams. Call it home.'鈥�
-Michael Waters
Read听Michael Collins's interview with Annie...听
Download Into the Cyclorama reader's guide...
The Into the Cyclorama cover artist is听.