Because Your There Is Small and My Here Is Big, We Are Breaking Up (2019)

The fourth poetry collection of forty-four poems by a poet at the age of forty-four, Because Your There marks the poet’s twenty years of literary career. Having lived her entire life in poetry, the poet has doggedly questioned language and poetry since her debut collection. Her most recent collection also reflects her dedication to writing and vocation as a poet. In Because Your There, Kim Min Jeong does not sugarcoat life––rather, she sees through her unrestrained yet weighty gaze the world where she makes kimchi-filled gochujang pancakes with a side of soju out of repulsion, the site of agony where everyone suffers the eternal damnation of having been born.

The main theme of this collection is “phantasm,” a convincing illusion of something that is not there. Whereas the poet’s past works have hitherto discussed intimate narratives concerning the issue of feminism, Because Your There expands the horizon of consciousness to our neighbors whom we have willfully overlooked, including the working class and women in Korea and abroad. The poet does not hesitate when she writes to express her frustration toward the bigoted reality that does not represent people from diverse walks of life.

The judges of the Lee Sanghwa Poetry Award have commented that “Kim Min Jeong has the inimitable style that never holds anything back when it comes to her maneuver of language,” and that “her poetry is especially notable for its fierce elasticity between words and the poet’s courage to expose herself through it.”

Born in 1976 in Incheon, Kim Min Jeong earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and a master’s certificate from Chung-Ang University. Her work first appeared in Munye Joongang in 1999 and won the magazine’s New Writers Award. She has since published poetry collections including Flying Porcupine Maiden, For the First Time, She Began to Feel, Beautiful and Useless, and Because Your There Is Small and My Here Is Big, We Are Breaking Up.