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Autobiography of Death
Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi (Translator)
4.05
791 ratings129 reviews
The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death—how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with “Face of Rhythm,” a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
GenresPoetryAsiaDeathFiction21st CenturyAsian LiteratureEbooksWomensAdultContemporary ...show all
110 pages, Paperback
First published May 24, 2016
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Kim Hyesoon38 books86 followers
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Born in Ulijin, South Korea, Kim Hyesoon (1955-) received her PhD in Korean Literature from Konkuk University, and began as a poet in 1979 with the publication of Poet Smoking a Cigarette. She began to receive critical acclaim in the late 1990s and she attributes this to the strong wave of interest in poetry by woman poets; currently she is one of South Korea’s most important contemporary poets, and she now lives and teaches in Seoul. Her poetry aims to strive for a freedom from form, by experimenting with language focusing on the sensual - often female - body, in direct opposition to male-dominated lyrical poetry. ‘They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women.’
Having published more than ten poetry collections, a number of these have been translated into English recently: When the Plug Gets Unplugged (2005); Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014) and I’m O.K., I’m Pig (2014). Tinfish has also published a small chapbook of three essays entitled Princess Abandoned (2012).
Throughout her career she has gained nearly all of South Korea’s most prestigious literary awards, named after the country’s greatest poets, such as Kim Su-yông Literature Award (1997), the Sowol Poetry Literature Award (2000) and the Midang Literature Award (2006). She was also the first female to win the Daesan Literary Award in 2008.
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Sleepless Dreamer
905 reviews414 followers
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March 16, 2023
A man reached out and groped me yesterday.
I found an alley to walk through on my way to my classes. Seoul's alleyways are so cute and when I saw the same man twice this week in that alley, I actually thought that it is great to see a familiar face, to feel a sense of community. I was considering telling him good morning.
Maybe this is the most infuriating part. I was thinking about feeling welcome in my new neighborhood, thinking about kindness. He was not even seeing me as a person. He had some boxes in the alley and he moved them for me to pass. I smiled in thanks and then, as I passed, felt his hand squeezing me.
I've never frozen like that before.
It took me a few seconds to realize that this is happening, there is a strange man's hand on my body, his hand is on me. He was grinning.
A million thoughts were running through my head. I don't know the Korean for "get your hand off me, you fucking creep". I don't know if it's acceptable to shove an older man in Korea. No one is here, is it wise to get into a fight over this? How can I express that I'm not okay with this? Why is he smiling like that?
And I was so shocked. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. I've heard other people describe that this can happen but this was the first time I could understand how people freeze in those moments. Everything and nothing was going through my mind, I was not fully there.
I'm not even sure how long this lasted, it felt like 5 years. It could have been 7 seconds.
When I backed away from him, he kept smiling at me, this stupid shit eating grin, one that says he knows exactly that what he did was wrong and doesn't care whatsoever. I left without saying a word.
I have been jumpy since. I keep feeling his hands on me. I have never felt this helpless. I have never felt this violated. My body did not belong to me in those moments and I feel as though something has been stolen from me, something has died, as if my control over my body was only ever temporary.
I've been reading statistics and psychology articles and feminist blogs, somehow looking for a way to make this feel normal, to make myself feel like this isn't something that will shape me. I keep trying to tell myself that it was just a hand on my body, that it was only a few seconds, that it's not that big of a deal really. Just a hand.
I started reading Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide because I want to know about Korean feminism. I want to understand the social perception of women here. While I'm still reading it, I also wanted to read some Korean poetry, to feel a little less alone. So I found this book.
Kim absolutely delivers. This book is phenomenal. 49 poems about death and love and religion and feminism and regrowth and pain. 49 poems, each one beautiful. Together, they make such a powerful whole. I loved reading this. It resonated so deeply. I sunk into her words and they transformed me.
I loved the depictions of dolls, of disasters, of children. Kim weaves in the Korean dictatorship with this prose that's always aimed at the reader, at us, childlike words connected to prayers and policy. So much despair, so much grief, so much power. I know I'll reread this body of work again.
I find Korea fascinating. I like Korea. I want to love Korea even more. Walking through that alley again will demand bravery but I'll do it. This city belongs to me, too. Korea might not be as feminist as it can be but women and femme presenting people deserve to feel safe in the street and I won't let this control me, I won't let it close Seoul's alleys for me. I won't let this take away my sense of freedom and power. As Kim illustrates, death is also life.
And if I see this man again, I've done my homework:
내게서 손 치워, 이 망할 소름끼치는 놈아
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Laura
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August 8, 2020
For day #6 of the Sealey Challenge, I read AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DEATH by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi. In an interview between the poet and the translator, Hyesoon reveals that she wrote these poems after the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014, which killed over 300 people, many of them high school students on a field trip. There’s a poem for each of the 49 days that the spirit is said to remain in limbo after death, before rebirth/reincarnation.
This is a harrowing book. Reading it in one sitting, I feel so many things. Awe. Horror. Heartbreak. Fully immersed in the realization that “(I’m being shoved out of the only body I have in the world)” – slowly, perhaps (for now), but inexorably.
Sometimes, it all felt like too much to bear, and I found myself asking, along with the speaker from Day Thirty-Three, “What can I do to forget all this?” But the poet doesn’t let up, and of course, the dead get no break from being dead, just as the bereaved cannot control grief’s timeline. So I rallied, and was repeatedly rewarded by powerful, disturbing imagery, and inventive language.
“Someone dead sits at the desk and crinkles paper
A cold winter night for the people of the North Pole
They gnaw on birds that have been buried in the ground wrapped in bearskin
the red birds that smell like their own heads” (“Smell,” p. 37)
“The spectacle of roaming after death as a faint adverb!” (p. 40)
“(I write. I write like an abductor. This child this child.)” (p. 62)
The book includes the aforementioned interview, and a translator’s note (more like an essay), both of which are illuminating, and I appreciate their placement at the end of the text, so that one can read the book with lesser mediation, if one wishes. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the wonderfully strange drawings by Fi Jae Lee that appear throughout the book.
You can read some poems from the book here:
http://modernpoetryintranslation.com/...
poetry
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Vicky
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December 26, 2018
Prior to reading this book of poems, I had never heard of the 2014 ferry that capsized in South Korea and drowned 250 high school students on a field trip, in which the crew told the students who were already wearing life jackets to stay inside their cabins while they escaped themselves. This ferry had been carrying 1,228 tons over the legal limit with 410 tons of iron being transported to a new naval base on Jeju Island (deregulation/privatization). But Autobiography of Death is also about many other deaths under the country's dictatorships with which I had no familiarity. It really helped to read the translator's note at the end part-way through the poems, and I would recommend reading the interview with Kim Hyesoon first, too. I need to just re-read this whole book over, to revisit. Incredible, and so dark. . .
death favorites poetry
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Anna
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April 11, 2026
There’s something electrifyingly unpredictable about the way Kim Hyesoon plays with language and imagery. Death is ongoing, absurd, almost bureaucratic, often grotesquely alive.
“Your heart dies like pebbles by the riverbank
Your heart dies like the sandy shore
Your breathing stops like the dark moon
Behind you, the days that couldn’t become you sob and break like waves”
2018-booklist in-translation poetry
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Radwa
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July 16, 2021
English Review Below
مجموعة شعرية مقسمة إلى 49 قصيدة تعبر عن الـ49 يوما التي تقضيها الروح ما بين الموت وإعادة البعث وفي النهاية قصيدة طويلة شخصية عن الألم، بمجموع 50 قصيدة في الكتاب تركز على الموت، الألم المعنوي والجسدي، الهجران والوحدة.
كل قصيدة ترويها روح أو شبح شخص كوري ميت، وقد قالت الكاتبة إنها تأثرت بحدثين رئيسيين في تاريخ كوريا الجنوبية وهما: مظاهرة "غوانغجو" الطلابية وحادث عبارة 2014 التي مات على إثرها أكثر من 300 شخص أغلبهم طلاب ثانوي.
ظننت مخطئة أن كل القصائد ستركز على الحدثين هذين بكثرة، لكن يبدو أنها تناقش الموت غير العادل بمختلف أشكاله وظروفه ومنهما هذين الحادثين، فنرى موت امرأة وأفكارها بعد الموت في مترو الأنفاق وغيرها.
أسلوب الكتابة الشعري نفسه ليس مفضلا عندي لكن لقيت بعض التشبيهات والمقاطع القوية جدا واللي أثرت فيا. وبصراحة بعتبر الحوار في آخر الكتاب بين الشاعرة والمترجمة أفضل جزء في الكتاب. وأعتقد أني حابة أقرأ ليها كمان، لأن عجبتني أفكارها السياسية والنسوية وقضاياها اللي بتعبر عنها حتى لو كان شعرها مش المفضل عندي.
A collection of poems split into 49 poems for the 49 days that the spirit roams in limbo between death and rebirth or reincarnation, and a long personal poem about pain in the end, with a total of 50 poems focusing on death, emotional and physical pain, abandonment, and loneliness.
Each poem is told by the spirit of a dead Korean, and the author said that she was affected by two main events in South Korea's history which are: Gwangju's uprising and the Sewol ferry tragedy in 2014, which killed over 300 people, most of them high school students.
I thought all of the poems would focus on these two events, but it seems that it just discusses death, as we see a poem from the point of view of a woman who died on the subway and others. The poetry style itself wasn't my cup of tea, but there were still some parts with strong imaging that hit me hard. Also the interview between her and the translator at the end was the best part of the book.
I'm actually excited to read more from here, because even though her style might not be really for me, I love what she discusses.
2020-awards adult dark-and-gothic
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Joseph Schreiber
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January 21, 2019
This engrossing collection of poems giving voice to death resonates with sorrow, anger and despair. Inspired by some of the tragic and violent incidents in recent Korean history, as well as other experiences with death that poet Kim Hyesoon has known, this collection is strange, sometimes grotesque, but at some point there is likely to be an image or a poem that speaks to your own encounters with tragedy and death.
Longer review here: https://roughghosts.com/2019/01/21/fo...
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John
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February 22, 2019
49 poems (plus an additional long one) for the 49 days the spirit roams between death and reincarnation. Each poem is “spoken” from the spirit of a dead person, all Koreans in this case. On the one hand it feels shamanistic and specific to the violent history of oppression in Korea. At the same time it’s completely resonant with anyone’s contemporary experience of both life and death within the ongoing oppressions worldwide. This will be read again.
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ola ✶ cosmicreads
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February 13, 2025
4.5 bardzo osobliwe, dziwne, ale nie dało się oderwać. mam wrażenie, że nie zrozumiałam wszystkiego, ale to, co udało się wyciągnąć było satysfakcjonujące.
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Kamila Kunda
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March 13, 2025
I read “Autobiografia śmierci” (“Autobiography of Death”), the collection of 49 poems (plus one long extra) by Kim Hyesoon in Polish, mesmerised by the raw beauty of phrases and images they evoke. According to the Buddhist belief, bardo is the state in which awareness lingers between death and rebirth for 49 days before being reincarnated into another being. Kim devoted her poems to the contemplation of death.
The starting point was the Sewol Ferry tragedy in 2014, the sinking of a ferry headed to the Jeju island, in which 304 people, among whom 250 high school students, died. Surrounded by death, Kim embarked on a journey meditating over the structure and nature of death and that state of bardo. In each poem the author explores pain, suffering, loneliness, but also sounds, textures, images, smells that constitute the structure of life and death. These are very difficult poems in terms of comprehension of all the symbolism, references to Korean history and treatment of women. They render profound traumas of Korean society as a whole.
Kim is a deeply feminist poem and reflects in her whole work on the nature of being a woman in South Korea. Her use of language is incredibly novel and I wish I was able to read her poems in Korean, cherishing the repetitive and incantatory verses, akin to Buddhist sutras - the quality impossible to replicate in translation.
This collection isn’t one to read quickly and put away on the shelf. It’s one to return to, over and over again, as in a trance, and embrace the complexity of the language as well as of human existence. Absolutely exquisite. Surreal and slightly futuristic illustrations by Fi Jae Lee adorn the pages of the book.
asia own poetry
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John
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February 2, 2026
I found this really strange, but not unsettling. The poems about reincarnation were my favorite. The last, really long poem was also very good
4-stars
