Grotesque Weather and Good People

In Korean novelist and poet Lim Solah’s English-language debut, Grotesque Weather and Good People, declarative sentences create a social critique grounded in the personal. In the opening poem, Solah muses, “Like scribbles on a cast, / pain is popular with sentences.” Indeed, the sentence is a unit of suffering here, though translators Oh Eunkyung and Olan Munson convey, with freshness and clarity, the wonder and humor at play in the margins.

In the poem “How?,” Solah describes her mother eating “toast with moldy jam,” and how she “gulped expired milk” while exclaiming, “It tastes just fine!” Later, the speaker grapples with disgust as she considers our innate drive toward survival: “How do the necks of flowers twist / together towards the sun? / How is wonder so gross?” 

“Grotesque weather” is the sociocultural air we breathe: disparities in wealth and power, animal neglect and pain, and self-loathing that comes from watching, as a powerless spectator, while horrifying events unfold in the media. In the poem “TV,” Solah’s speaker recalls how she

[…] saw the story of the dead woman who was dragged downtown by her hair.

Hundreds of people just stood by and watched. I munch on chips as I write this down. 

Solah complicates the notion of “good people” through considerations of culpability within this “grotesque weather.” For example, the poem “Did you feel the urge to kill?” describes a reporter’s interview with a child who had murdered someone because their “siblings were starving […].” Asked whether they feel bad, the child responds: “If I didn’t take the money, someone else would’ve.”

Solah’s poetic multiplicity of self, which the translators describe as “‘me’s’ that watch each other, overlap, multiply, disappear […],” may or may not be “good people.” In “Forecast,” the poet writes, “I often hear that I seem like a good person. / It’s generally the same and generally different from hearing that I’m an evil person.” And in “Sand,” many selves reckon, paradoxically, with isolation:

Today there’s no end to the me’s.
I heap me’s up like a mound of sand
and try to count them until none are left. 

“I’m not alone,” you say, but I wonder 
how long you were.