Kim Yideum's Cheer Up, Femme Fatale Reviewed at Fanzine

At Fanzine, Megan Milks reviews Kim Yideum’s Cheer Up, Femme Fatale (Action Books, 2016), translated from the Korean by Ji Yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson. "Kim is well known in Korean poetry and internationally, and Cheer Up, Femme Fatale is the first collection of her poems published in English," writes Milks.

It’s a witchy, traumatized book. At turns flippant, mordant, grieving, confrontational, Kim’s poems swing wildly, and the punches that land are both comedic, and hurt. Many are populated by grotesque objects; many operate in a Gurlesque mode. Especially in the first two sections, Kim’s poems are delivered by an unstable, polyvocal “I”, an incoherent subjectivity we might call, via the title, the femme fatale. Kim’s femme fatale is dangerously charming, languid, shockingly morbid. Her smile is a leer; her wink a nervous tic; she will not cheer up.

Her occasional power is displayed in outlandish ways. In “Fluxfilm No. 4 (Lesbian),” a woman walks across a bridge and the objects around her break and repel: “When I approach, mirrors crack and coats rip. Beds fall apart, and bookcases topple….When I approach, things run away.” Elsewhere, other things—objects—become animated and agentive. “Lost and Found” presents a cabinet of not curiosities but “wretched objects” that “fornicate and reproduce” while abandoned to storage. Discarded and sometimes paradoxical—e.g., “the gunshot sound of Mayakovsky’s suicide”—these lost objects will not rest.

Objects exert agency frequently in this book, which blurs human-object boundaries. In “A Sealed Woman,” our femme fatale enters a motel room to fuck; then, through a series of wild, generative leaps in image, becomes a mannequin who is swallowed by, becomes part of, a whale/lover on a waterbed that is “the billowing sea.” “The Guitarist on the Street” adopts similar logic, using substitution to transfer the visual properties of a baby onto a guitar: “The woman on the street holds a guitar tightly, as if to shove her breast into it.” Again, these discarded subjects-made-objects refuse to accept their lot. At the end of the poem, the guitar pushes her mother into the guitar case. Bye.

Read the full review at Fanzine.