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.