“The more readers (and speakers) struggle for coherence or clarity, the more the poem resists, tempting us with a more complete meaning…”

Entering Kim’s verse of reverie and fragmentation is not easy or even at times comfortable. But do. Her initial poems in this collection are the most abstracted, broken, even incomprehensible. But soon enough, we see what she is about, and the collection as a whole, the Commons, becomes a terrifying package of traumatic memory, of identity torn apart, of horror that we hope to un-imagine.

The more readers (and speakers) struggle for coherence or clarity, the more the poem resists, tempting us with a more complete meaning, even while–as we see it slowly emerge–we know that is is far better to tuck it back away. This is indeterminacy and ambiguity done right, poems that reveal as much as our consciousness can attend, but never what humanity will truly visit upon itself. The worst of it lives in the white spaces of the page . . .

“Foods cast off from one culture become the fetish foods of another
l b
Speaker: There will be misery in the years of greed. The world will become small and humiliated.
what is folder, are the persimmons
what is shelled, are the chestnut

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“Bloom already in mark
So that it were a bloom
Steeped in increments
Marks as were scars

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“deterge to wash off or out, to clear away
s-s-s

shun . nestle
ravenous . seal
ash . gust

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“Lifts up his burning
A strange now a strange in my clean head”