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Korean Literature Now

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[FEATURED REVIEW] The Body We Call Our Own scrap

by Jack Saebyok Junggo link September 7, 2026

[FEATURED REVIEW] The Body We Call Our Own 이미지

Biologicity

 

Shin Hae-uk’s Biologicity has been a touchstone for Korean poets since it appeared in 2009. In a Winter 2025 interview for KLN, the poet Im Seungyu said she doubts there is a writer in Korea who hasn’t passed through it. Spencer Lee-Lenfield’s recent translation was nominated last year for the 2025 Lucien Stryk Prize. The recognition is well earned, for Shin’s poetic voice may seem too idiosyncratic to cross into another language at all. Shin writes a poetry preoccupied with what it might be to exist and feel as something other than a stable, bounded self. That preoccupation is real, and yet this description cannot do justice to the book’s strangeness and, just as often, its humor. These are poems about what it feels like to be an organism, a self uncomfortably housed in a body, leaking at the seams into other people, animals, objects, and even the dead.

 

The collection’s governing unease lies in how easily a self can dissolve into sameness. “Let’s share a name from now on,” proposes the speaker of “Apart, But Together,” a name that is “Perfectly equal.” The offer is tender and faintly menacing at once, for to share a name is to risk becoming interchangeable, an indistinguishable item in place of a singular life. Shin’s speakers register that risk even as they court it, insisting on the oddness of their own embodiment while the body refuses to cooperate. In “Some Thoughts on Not Ending,” the speaker reports, “Each day I die in someone else’s dream,” before arriving at the book’s quiet thesis: “I am sadness become human.” Selfhood here is less a possession than a symptom.

 

That predicament is staged with deadpan literalism and a habit of veering without warning. A house speaks. A color speaks. Planets, child­hood friends, and a witch from a fairy tale each take the microphone in turn. The speakers are forever out of sync with their own anatomy. In “Birthday, Haply” (the chance-haunted pun on “happy” is the point), a body’s “ears, eyes, mouth, nose exist most of the time as they like,” wandering off and only sometimes returning, while their owner admits, “I’ve never learned how to keep them straight.” In “Times Table,” a speaker can “only do the tables from memory up to nine,” her fingers forever “one too few,” until she finds herself “becoming a number.” In “Catcher in the Rye,” the speaker is “soaked in emotion” while reading a textbook, underlining every word “with all my heart” but weeping “with just one eye.” The wit never quite dispels the dread. A sack informs its contents, flatly, “This is no place for you to be.”

 

In the aforementioned interview, Shin described her craft as a matter of “‘collecting,’ ‘dislocating,’ and ‘transplanting’” words: she gathers terms that, in ordinary use, “look subordinate to their indexical function, dead and buried under the dust of habit,” then digs them “up by the roots” and replants them in “the soil of a text” so they “can have a new life.” Biologicity is also, by her own account, an effort to “save time in that void created between lines, between stanzas,” to capture “not time’s flow” but “time’s motion.” The result is a poetry of short breath and abrupt silences, at once precise and porous, in which the thinking arrives sidelong, through surreal scenarios rather than statement. At its best, in poems like “Hands,” “One Hundred Percent House,” and “End of the Earth,” the work opens a palpable gap between perception and the body we call our own.

 

Lee-Lenfield’s translation, the latest in Black Ocean’s Moon Country Korean Poetry Series (which has also brought Moon Boyoung, Ha Jaeyoun, and Oh Eun into English), is alert to all of this. Checked against the original, his versions are faithful at the level of the line yet read as real English poems. “Catcher in the Rye” tracks the original’s purpose clauses almost word for word (“that children in pain might not suffer, / and trees dying alone might not feel lonely”), and the close of “Hands” becomes “What I really envied / wasn’t you / but your tender fingers,” about as good as one could hope for. He resists the temptation to smooth Shin’s oddness into fluency, keeping her hard stops and tonal swerves intact.

 

Shin’s poems thrive on what she calls the “foreign-object sensation,” a deliberate awkward­ness lodged in the language like a splinter. She has recalled how the book’s title itself “just kept floating around because it couldn’t find a place,” “sliding around,” she says, until it had “left its traces over a bunch of different poems,” at which point she made it the title of the whole collection. It is, fittingly, a coinage: saengmulseong fuses saengmul (“organism,” literally “living thing”) with the abstract suffix -seong, close to the English “-ity,” and Lee-Lenfield’s “Biologicity” lands in English as a freshly minted, faintly clinical noun, exactly as the Korean does. Some effects inevitably slip the net, and Lee-Lenfield’s foreword and note on the translation name those losses rather than papering over them, which is part of what makes the volume instructive.

 

Shin has said that her poems in translation “feel like Voyager 2, out beyond our solar system,” and that she hopes “the nuances of my language also touch someone out there.” In Lee-Lenfield’s lucid, unhurried English, the signal arrives intact. Throughout Biologicity, Shin treats the body as a place we are only renting, and the loneliness of that arrangement, punctuated by jokes, lingers well past the last page. It is a small book that keeps getting larger the longer one sits with it.

Writer 필자 소개

Jack Saebyok Jung

Jack Saebyok Jung

Jack Saebyok Jung is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and the author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus (Black Square Editions, 2025). A Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he co-translated Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), winner of the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work. His most recent book of translation is Kim Hyesoon’s Lady No (Ecco, 2026). He teaches at Davidson College.

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