Chicago Review of Books Reviews Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony

For Chicago Review of Books, Jed Munson reviews Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), calling the book "an imaginative and highly multimedia mode of accessing a space where human perspective is forbidden." Munson is referring to the DMZ of the title, "the 4-by-250-kilometer area that is the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)," which "exists as one of the most heavily militarized borders on the planet." More from this review:

…In reality a restricted, literally marginal entity, the DMZ, in Choi’s hands, is like an accordion, expansive and multidimensional, even planetary in scale. To trace its boundaries is to migrate along the flight paths of endangered cranes known to winter in its mostly undisturbed marshes, as well as to parallel their migrations, as in “Sky Translation.” The speaker recounts spotting geese formations along the 38th parallel north, the latitude approximating the Korean DMZ, except that in the poem she looks up from Saint Louis, Missouri. 

Another parallel (or translation, as with an image translated over an axis), finds her in Marfa, Texas, a bit off course, roughly eight degrees south of 38°N—“not my usual migratory route” Choi notes. That poem, “Planetary Translation,” features three feverishly elegant line drawings, scrap notes from a conversation she had with a human rights activist about civilian massacres enacted under the military regimes of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan.…

Read on at Chicago Review of Books.