Today I’m Not Sure (2017) is the third poetry collection of Shim Bo Sun, whose first book published fourteen years after his debut has attracted many readers and critics alike. On his poetic sensibility that leaps a not-so-short time period in one breath, the literary critic Lee Kwang Ho writes, “his sensitivity has long passed the 90s and already anchored in the contemporary with the young poets of the 2000s.” The raw metaphors fished from every day, with the poised humor quintessential of the poet shining through them, doubtlessly deserved the readers’ attention. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Sociology from Seoul National University, Shim Bo Sun went abroad to pursue a Ph.D. in Sociology at Columbia University. During the years he dedicated to research that digs into human life with rigorous questions, writing poetry in solitude both consoled and delighted him.

Today I’m Not Sure reflects the everyday life of the poet who has frequented the sites of social change, especially in “The Station Where the Brown Bag Was,” a poem about a young worker who died while fixing the platform doors at Guui Station, and “The Twenty-Third Person,” about the mass layoff by Ssangyong Motors. In these poems, the poet does not stop at simply observing the timeline of the incidents but asks the readers to conceive the deceased as one unified subject by calling the victims’ names. As his lines sing the resolution for life that hasn’t ended, the poet’s third book delivers the possibility of preventing our lives from being riddled with tragedies.

In an interview, Shim Bo Sun remarked, “A human is barely human,” meaning that we are not always human by default but barely become human by treating life more humanely. Therefore, we must not stop studying and contemplating what makes us continue living as humans. The poet’s poignant insight into life and exceptional literary sensibility renders his poems indispensable.