Cold Candies

Cold Candies gathers a selection of prose poems by Lee Young-ju, translated by Jae Kim, in which the South Korean poet sketches elemental, deeply surreal scenes with remarkable creative energy. The poet’s sensibility is perfectly goth—“How about adopting a fully grown girl? Says a broken-headed doll. Talks with its mouth shut. The dyed-black lace flaps”—but she approaches fear and despair with a detached tone that sometimes borders on whimsy: “This strange reaction I have of weeping whenever the inside of my body darkens.” 

“The Summer Returns Home” opens with a fast-paced montage of “cutting” images, the last with grisly effect: “The knife has been in the back pockets of strangers. The forest, full, used a sharp leaf to cut across the summer’s face. The strangers’ teeth were black, and the sweet sugarcane dyed the throats of the birds red.” But in many other poems, Young-ju works more gradually, developing three-dimensional compositions as though deliberately arranging actors and props on a stage. Items frequently seem to move magically, appearing here, then there, sometimes in impossible positions, and the body itself is often both subject and object: “I was born out of hunger as prey for me to eat. Once the time I have to replicate myself ends, will I know which corpse is mine?” 

These poems call to mind the plays of Samuel Beckett, paintings by Francis Bacon, and films such as Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House, but in the end they realize a highly original horror, one that allows the reader to observe their own anxiety as separate, an entity apart, like the various elements in Young-ju’s elaborate scenes. What these poems offer, among other things, is a chance to grapple with our estrangement from the dead: “We wrote eulogies to deepen your name. We wrote, shipwrecked in reality.”