Catcalling

“Kyungjin I don’t want to eat anymore / Not your sagging tits, not even your protruding nipples / I don’t want to eat you dirty bitch,” writes Lee Soho in her award-winning debut, Catcalling, translated from the Korean by Soje. But who exactly is Kyungjin? Are they a semi-fictionalised version of Lee, whose birth name is also Kyungjin? And, if so, what are we to make of the appearance of a male Kyungjin, or of the poem “Apology Letter,” which begins with “Hello, I am Lee Soho and I write poems”? 

Through its five formally distinct sections, Catcalling destabilizes the idea of any singular confessional lyric-protagonist. Instead, Kyungjin is the complex, multivalent voice of the many survivors who seek to emancipate themselves from the hierarchies of patriarchal society. Lee’s depictions of sex and violence, animated to the point of being almost cartoonish in style, feel claustrophobic, a heady reminder of how abuse against women is so normalized across all social units, whether in the privacy of the home, in Korean literary institutions, or in the global context of the #MeToo movement. The cycle of violence can be difficult to break. In a footnote to a poem about velvet spiders who carry out matriphagy, Lee writes: “The children are fated to repeat that same instinct as they become mothers.” Despite irreverent poem titles like “May I Live with South-Facing Windows in My Next Life, Please” or “Every Man Who Has Ridden and Written Me,” one cannot help but feel unnerved by the barbed babble of misogynist language, slurs, and catcalls that filter through Kyungjin’s persona, by way of sing-song nursery rhymes and childlike dis-logic. It’s in part thanks to this explosive juxtaposition that Catcalling feels so urgently intense, charged with a poetic boldness that is always unexpected and playful as well as darkly humorous.