Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

“The first Koreans were part god, part beast. / Every morning I look in the mirror and ask: / Which will I be today?” writes Joan Kwon Glass in “Bloodline,” the first poem of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, a striking collection where the mythical and the historical intersect with personal memories and day-to-day life:

As children, we sang a Korean nursery rhyme about a lone rabbit
who ascends a mountain. None of us can remember
learning this song, but all of us know it by heart.

Throughout the book, the past comes to life in the figure of the “hungry ghost” who represents the effects of Japan's colonization of and military presence in South Korea—

During the occupation,
a Japanese soldier spat
at my grandmother’s feet
then waited for her to dare 
unbow her head. She did not.

Several poems in the book have “Hungry Ghost” in their titles—“Foodless Hungry Ghost,” “Underworld Hungry Ghost,” “Living on Hope Hungry Ghost”—which are also rendered in Korean characters, and which attest to the unresolved grief and traumas that have been passed down to the speaker’s family across the generations. Some of the poems address the physical and emotional effects of this inherited trauma, such as the speaker’s eating disorder: “Since learning to eat grief, / I have been insatiable.”

Glass’s book is permeated by a deep-seated sorrow; memories of her sister’s and nephew’s deaths resurface at different times, echoing other moments of tragedy and loss in the family’s past:

In the summer of 2016, I didn’t know it would be the last time.
I didn’t know that by the next summer, we would [be] mourning my sister 
and her son, that it would be too painful to go back,
that we would never return to Michigan as a family.

A pervasive sense of disorientation and estrangement runs through this book, and is captured with poignancy by the speaker: “[W]e have become birds / who deviated too far to make it back on our own."