Lady No

Translated by Jack Saebyok Jung

From the legendary avant-garde poet Kim Hyesoon, a landmark collection documenting her first and only work of digital performance art to date.

In March 2014, Kim Hyesoon, the grand dame of contemporary Korean poetry, began to post anonymously on the online blog of Munhakdongne, a major South Korean publisher. Rather than use her own name, Kim Hyesoon’s chosen persona for these blog posts was Lady No. Fittingly, Lady No’s writings are dissenting, combative, subversive, and ontologically feminine; formally, they defy any attempt at easy categorization. They are neither poems, nor are they prose, but a radical innovation Kim calls shisanmun—an ungovernable style that heralds her internationally acclaimed works Autobiography of Death and Phantom Pain Wings.

The entries in this seminal collection, arranged chronologically and in their entirety here for the first time, are an eclectic hybrid of opinion editorials, aphorisms, recipes, daydreams, travelogues, art criticism, as well as treatises on the metaphysics of poetry and the current state of international literature. They take place in and around the world but most often they return to a country called Aerok, a frightening yet familiar mirror of contemporary Korea. First unwittingly, and then with concentrated grief, they chart the course of one of the most politically significant years in recent South Korean history: the sinking of the MV Sewol on the morning of April 16th that killed 304 people, including 250 high school students, and the reverberations of this national tragedy that culminated in the impeachment and ouster of the country’s then-sitting president. Taken together, these writings bear witness to the people’s shame, mourning, and perseverance under a corrupt administration—a painful public reckoning not dissimilar from our own.  

Surreal but visceral, and inflected with both humor and rage, Lady No contains perhaps the most accessible of Kim Hyesoon’s writing to date and documents her first and only work of digital performance art. Totaling 179 individual entries and featuring 34 drawings by the artist Fi Jae Li, Lady No explores the inner and outer lives of contemporary Korean women and embodies the inextricable link between social justice and literary citizenship.

“Poetry in Korea has been a vaunted form—and traditionally left to men. Kim broke away from the masculine styles that came before her. . . . Kim has pursued a vernacular that’s intensely Korean yet open to the world.” —E. Tammy Kim, New Yorker