Glory Hole

A human needn’t speak human words!

Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole lets loose a dizzying mixtape of metatextual references across a series of sometimes interrelated, heavily footnoted prose poems. The opening poem, “Inhumane^1)2)3)4)5),” gives us an inkling of the experimental mischief to come. As translators Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan explain, Hyun “hoards real and fictive references, distorts them, and plays with the violent incoherence that emerges.” Yet Hyun’s love for his materials, especially music, is evident throughout this collection. In addition to mischievously mistitled Beat, sci-fi, and porn classics, the Korean indie band Denci Hinji appears as a “sci-fi novelist and folk musician suffering from story amnesia,” the Belgian painter René Magritte is reimagined as a singer, and Gary Moore is “a stud who played the guitar in the saddest way.”

In “What Do Angels Do on Silent and Holy Nights,” we observe the biblical angel Michael, exhausted from his work in a chicken processing factory, come home to a feline angel Gabriel whose “fur splashed” with a “keen luster,” and on whose “contours shone slim moonlight.” A footnote explains: “Cats were originally tame clouds, and their major sources of food are night, rain, and snowflakes.”

Though the translator’s note warns Hyun’s “poems are not graceful” and his aesthetic leans toward a “shattering of the sensible world,” these wild stories are brimming with musical moments, like the “deep […] feeble sleep” of a woman named Eve. While it’s easy to feel lost within the leaping text, Hyun’s descriptions are stunning, if disturbing. A “mutated human moves much more naturally” with an “elongate[d] neck,” and while “[s]couting around the meal that several can share, the / stretched neck and head sweep swollen dust and glide into a bathroom.” 

The expression “glory hole” comes from an early 1800s old Scots expression for an often untidy, small miscellaneous storage space (the Scottish glaur means “to make muddy, dirty, defile”) and traveled through nautical, mining, and glassblowing usages before appearing in gay slang. I can’t help but suspect the author had myriad meanings in mind when selecting this title for his collection.