“Mom, do not read this poetry. It’s all sand.”

Kim Hye-soon, the poet who makes us gaze into the blank void in ourselves

The poems of endlessly scorching sand

that traverses across the desert of oblivion, bearing witness to grief

If the Earth Dies, Whom Will the Moon Circle? published by Moonji Publishing is the 14th collection of poems written by Kim Hye-soon, a “poet of poets” who has renewed the aesthetics of contemporary Korean poetry with the language of the body that goes against the predominant language. It is the poet’s first collection of poems to be released in three years since 2019, when Phantom Pain Wings was published. Since 1979, when Kim first started publishing poetry, she has always been at the “forefront of poetic bodies that are the first to say goodbye to the institutionalized histories” (Lee Kwang-ho). Kim Hye-soon’s collections go beyond the work of a single poet – they are like a constellation that connects the sharpest points of contemporary Korean poetry at different periods, an archive of poetic experimentation. The poet has continued her “endless contemplation on the way women exist” to achieve her “unique poetic achievement” (Samsung Ho-Am Prize in the Arts). She also established a clear international presence, being a poet who “stays faithful to the emotions and identity of the female body, penetrating nightmares and darkness with a voice that is both tender and furious while opening up new poetic ecstasies” (juries of the Swedish Cikada Prize).

Kim Hye-soon laments the death of the universe in If the Earth Dies, Whom Will the Moon Circle? Part 1 consists of poems of grief, written at the time when the “Mother” of the poet was ill and after she passed away, hovering around death. Part 2 captures the desperation of the times in the face of the universal catastrophe of COVID-19, while Part 3 is a record of the poet’s wanderings through the empty desert outside of death. The poet sees the death of the world and the grief hidden in every single death, all through the personal experience of having witnessed illness and death. In a solidarity of grief, the poet watches will all her might to see what the shattered and fragmented grains of life are doing in the desert of oblivion that is death itself. Readers finally discover through Kim’s poetry that death is something that “we must infinitely go through, defeat, and suffer throughout life.”

Moonji Publishing Co., "If the earth dies, whom will the moon circle?", https://moonji.com/book/30991/. accessed 18 April 2024.