Love Shall Be Born (2017) is the fifth poetry collection of Yi Won, who began her literary journey in 1992 by publishing her work in Literature of the World. Since her debut, she has stood as one axis of the avant-garde of contemporary Korean poetry, sharply dissecting with her unique language and imagery the dehumanized landscape of modern civilization and the life and modes of existence that deteriorate in it. The poet has conjured up the appropriate symbol of a “digital desert” and relentlessly questioned the identity of humans floating in the world where salvation and suffering, hope and despair intersect.

In this book, comprising sixty-one poems in five chapters entitled “Apple Store,” “Night and Day,” “Showroom,” “Cube,” and “All Nights and Days,” Yi Won is inspired by the incomplete, dynamic energy and innocence of children to paint the independent image of children and their flexible thinking that surpasses the terms of reality and materiality while looking straight into the abyss of death and solitude inherent in life. The poet deeply mourns the communal tragedy that is the sinking of MV Sewol by poetically juxtaposing next to the purity and innocence of children the insurmountable grief, despair, and powerlessness stemming from the reality that the children could not return from the sea. The poems then sing of the newborn possibility of love, the hope to progress together across the realm of grief toward a new dream.

Yi Won tries writing herself as a poetry-writing creature. Also tries writing that she finds poetry most difficult and increasingly incomprehensible but can’t stop loving it. She passes through time while keeping most of the things supported together by what poetry has taught her. She likes human-made colors and scents and often flips through contradictions where the simultaneity of difference resides. She collects matches for times when the mind’s lamp goes out. The matches have blue heads, and each book has a different smell. She believes she can start a fire when a match is close by. She is the author of the poetry collections When They Conquered the Earth, Yahoo! A Thousand Moons Emerge on the River, The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, The History of Impossible Paper, and Love Shall Be Born. She teaches poetry writing at the Seoul Institute of Art.