By the Power of Light Vested in Me (2021) is the third poetry collection of Lee Hyemi, who has swum in the world of water separating “us” and carved the ripples in her poetry. The poetic world of Lee Hyemi, whose previous books focused on observing the relationship between “you” and “I” and paid close attention to the events through which the two world spill into each other through tides and ebbs, expands in this book into “one that bears the completeness of being alone, no longer in the context of a certain relationship.”

Within “I” painfully reside the unspoken words that grew into a dense forest. The speaker decides not to keep the overgrown forest inside her, to unload the excessive branches of swallowed words by shaking her own world. This change comes from a realization that “shattered things shine more brightly” (from “Holography”). What’s facing us when we “pick up a broken shard and encounter its light” is Lee Hyemi’s blindingly iridescent poetry, or, as the literary critic So Yujeong called it, “holography on a blank paper.” In the book, the “filthy water” where a tree is rooted and reflected on captures the mirror image of the speaker’s pathological interiority and paints her self-portrait. By creating small ripples that disrupt the reflections on the water’s surface, the speaker boldly turns her world upside-down and lets the upended universe ooze out. The words that had been kept inside, the “stale mud,” flows out of her mouth. The liquid will find a course, drawing a “strange map.”

Lee Hyemi was born in Anyang in 1988. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Korean Literature from Konkuk University and completed her PhD coursework in Korean literature at Korea University. Her first published poem won the JoongAng New Writers Award in 2006. She is the author of the poetry collections Ultraviolet, Unexpected Vanilla, Scar Cookie, and the essay collection Confessions on the Kitchen Table. In addition to the JoongAng New Writers Award, she has won the 2022 Best Poetry of the Year and the 2021 Goyang Haengju Literary Award.