What Errand Are You Running (2020) is the sixth poetry collection by Kim Haengsook. One of the leading figures of the futurist poets who brought new vitality to the Korean literary scene in the 2000s, Kim Haengsook has continuously expanded her literary scope through daring poetic experiments and inexhaustible questions on art. She is also a poet who has focused on the world of malleable forms, “melting faces,” and “reverberating echoes.” Against the fate of writing, which can never be complete nor completely novel, the poet has patiently sought the “possibility of true word.” In this book, Kim Haengsook gives shapes to her concerns in “the stories told by K the errand-runner.” It seems as though the texts of Kafka, Goethe, Bae Suah, or Gi Hyeong-do, directly entered Kim Haengsook’s poetry, but transformed into something audaciously different, as if they have long been in the poet’s memory vessel, all smashed and spattered. With both her hands full of strange stories that were once familiar to us, Kim Haengsook comes back from her errand, propelling poetry forward by amplifying the mystery that is literature, rather than trying to solve it.

The most conspicuously and variously transformed text in this book is Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Six-foot-tall and 118-pound, Kafka is known as a prolific writer who, despite his illness, produced a massive volume of novels and letters. Often read as a confessional text, The Metamorphosis is a story of the protagonist who becomes an insect yet whose remaining human consciousness prevents him from adapting completely to living as a different species. For this text, Kim Haengsook opens the door to “the dream of a complete insect” by refracting it into countless directions. Locked in the world of writing, Gregor Samsa, a Korean laborer called Kim, and Kafka are those whose beings transform infinitely through the inversion of texts and dreams.  

Kim Haengsook was born in Seoul. She studied Korean language education at Korea University, where she also earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in Korean literature. She began her literary career in 1999 by publishing a poem in Modern Literature. Her published works include the poetry collections Springtime, The Ability to Part, The Significance of Others, The Portrait of Echo, and 1914, and the essay collections Eros and Aura, A Book to Be Loved, and The Melancholy of Angels.