City Gas (2022) is the eighth poetry collection of Lee Sumyeong, a poet at the frontline of avant-garde deconstructing the order of real-life language. Intriguingly, the collection includes six poems titled “City Gas” without any numeric or other determiners that would assign an expected continuity to the serial poems.

City Gas depicts a “depleted person” whose potential is fundamentally blocked in the two-dimensional world where people are arranged like things. A being who has lost the very purpose of action, rather than was deprived of interiority or denied an opportunity, this person lacks either a past to return to or a future to look forward to.

Lee Sumyeong was born in Seoul in 1965. She graduated from Seoul National University with a bachelor’s degree in Korean Literature and earned a PhD in Creative Writing from Chung-Ang University. She made her debut in 1994 by publishing in Writers’ World and has since published poetry collections including New Misreadings Filled the Streets, A Heron Plays A Heron’s Play, The Curve of the Red Wall, A Cat Watching A Cat Video, Always Too Much Rain, and As If. Her other published works include her academic monograph, Kim Gu-Yong and Modern Korean Poetry; the critical essay collections The Age of Air Raids, Crossing, and The Poetics of Surface; and translations of works by Lacan, Derrida, Joyce, and Romantic writers. She has won the 2001 Park Inhwan Literary Award, the 2011 Contemporary Poetry Prize, the 2012 Nojak Literary Award, the 2019 Seorabeol Literary Award, and the 2022 Tongyeong Literary Award (also known as the Chungma Literary Award), among others.