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Chiwan Choi

Auteur de Abductions

4 oeuvres 19 utilisateurs 3 critiques

Œuvres de Chiwan Choi

Abductions (2012) 6 exemplaires
The Flood (2010) 5 exemplaires
Nathan Ota - Ikiru (2013) 4 exemplaires
The Yellow House (2017) 4 exemplaires

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Courte biographie
http://chiwanchoi.com/bio

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One part poetry, one part meditation on memory, Chiwan Choi’s third collection, The Yellow House, is a collage of captured instances, a tale of remembrances fragmented by time. A haunting, semi-hallucinatory trip through the immigrant’s perpetual no-man’s land—that zone between old home and new where people and places, love and death, happiness and sadness mingle—The Yellow House is about the struggle to belong, to reconcile the land of the past with that of the present. Seeing that reconciliation as a fundamentally impossible endeavor, the poet’s thoughts turn to forgetting one set of memories or the other, ultimately failing in this as anyone must.

Born as it is of a multitude of recollections, The Yellow House is not so cerebral as to be inaccessible. Far from it. This collection feels immediate, reads very much as the story of Choi’s life, often flirting with the mode of lyric memoir. There’s an acceptance of paradoxes here, the sort of contradictions that define everyone’s relationships with their parents. At once somehow god-like, everything to us, all parents ultimately fail us both while they are alive and in the fact that they do not live forever, leaving us assured only of our own mortality.

Choi’s parents figure prominently in these poems, many of the pieces referencing his father, more still his mother. His family having emigrated from Korea when he was very small, Choi seems constantly at cross purposes with himself, struggling to feel at home in the new land and the forgotten one, never completely achieving the sort of idyllic existence he longs for in either. There’s a glorification of both old and new homes here, and, thus, a devaluation of them as well. In this, Choi captures and rarefies the immigrant’s experience—the lure of the perfect future that never comes to pass, the love for a past made grander by the fact that it never was.

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/kbaumeister/2017/05/the-nervous-breakdowns-re...


… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
kurtbaumeister | Oct 25, 2017 |
"The Flood" is a collection of poems by this Korean-American writer, which are mainly centered in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, and describe broken lives, troubled relationships, and failed love and dreams. Unfortunately, I found the vast majority of these poems to be bloodless and trivial, and not a single one of them struck a chord with me.
 
Signalé
kidzdoc | 1 autre critique | Aug 29, 2010 |

Statistiques

Œuvres
4
Membres
19
Popularité
#609,294
Évaluation
4.0
Critiques
3
ISBN
4