Kim Yideum’s Cheer Up, Femme Fatale Shatters With Laughter

...She instead draws her reader’s attention to the “fantastical” and ultimately disembodied voice asserted earlier in the poem in order to denounce it. Yet Kim’s poems are simultaneously populated by bloody keys and the dismembered bodies of Bluebeard’s wives. Later in the poem, the speaker states: “We don’t have any more places to hang the bodies in the basement. We ran out of space to bury the bodies in the garden also. Some say I lure them here, but what can I do, when they voluntarily come here and take of their clothes?” There is no Bluebeard and there is no last wife. She doesn’t humanize the abuser through persona nor write women’s agency back into the narrative, but instead turns to a voice that generates a collective complicity in the ongoing production of these bodies.

Kim disrupts the possibility for a coherent narrative of trauma, and throughout her poems bodily fluids negate the possibility of the body’s coherence and containment. Kim often places her reader in the position of witnessing speakers in search of their own self-destruction. These speakers don’t desire a savior, which makes it difficult for a reader to “claim” the narrative for feminism without becoming involved in a complex relation between masochism, abuse, and complicity; this undoing also resists the colonization of trauma. What’s a colonizer to do when the subject refuses to be saved? The subject instead negates herself and slips through the reader’s fingers. For example, in “The Night Before Opening a Barbie Repair Shop in an Abandoned Mental Hospital,” the speaker’s “boredom” is “swept away” when they declare that a man “grabs me by the throat and slap me around a few times. // I’m in a much better mood now.” What to make of the masochism? Kim’s catalog of marginalized bodies is not constructed in the language of victims and survivors. Her speakers are simultaneously radically passive and radically masochistic. The poem manifests in the fracture between the “Barbie Repair Shop” and “Abandoned Mental Hospital.” Kim refuses to simplify the ways sexual abuse, stigma against mental illness, and objectification are produced. The doll-femme-body is valuable enough to repair—the femme body will be “fixed” into doll form or abandoned. This poem’s speakers oscillate between doll, hospital patient, and doctor, until it is difficult to tell who is what...

Read the full review at The Bind.