PRAISE FOR OSSIA
“OSSIA is thrillingly alive. There’s an inventive daring at work in the lines that feels at times like a song, at times like the voice in your head, telling you about yourself and others, everything you do and don’t want to know. One part intimate self-regard, one part provocation, this lyric extension of a conversation between friends, between mentor and mentee, the living and the dead, lover and beloved, pursues a series of renewals as the poet offers the poems in Korean and English, hoping to include all of the registers ofhis feelings. The result is a gorgeous game of language and poetry, conducted for the highest stakes: love.”
–ALEXANDER CHEE, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“To enter OSSIA is to step inside a haunted house, a hall of mirrors, and an echo chamber all at once. At the outset, Jimin Seo’s speaker (disguised as himself, or himselfin disguise) offers traces of a family history marked by abandonment and loss, and one whose legacy includes a habit of retreating into one’s headspace so deeply that anything outside it, even one’s own body, seems strange, and too unpredictable to approach—except, of course, through language. In other words, he is made a poet. ‘I am a child of nothing,’ Seo writes, ‘that is to say / I am a child of books and the voice they sang / into my body.’
“Fortunately, Seo comes to share a life-defining friendship with the legendary poet Richard Howard, a bond so magical that the late Howard’s voice is virtually resurrected in the book’s ongoing dramatic exchange. Parts of this back-and-forth appear also in Seo’s native Korean, which recurs throughout the book as if from the speaker’s alternate (ossia means ‘alternatively’) linguistic perspective. Uncanny, gorgeous, wise, exhilarating, and driven to represent the messy business of subject formation as accurately, but as exquisitely, as possible, OSSIA is an extraordinary achievement, and unlike anything I’ve read before.”
–TIMOTHY DONNELLY, author of Chariot
“Abounding with ghost and animal voices, Jimin Seo’s OSSIA makes a radiant and enchanting debut that musically oscillates between Korean and English. There is a mythological tone that permeates the collection, that tells and retells themes of death, birth, and rebirth mainly in the form of letters and incantatory address. One does not need Korean reading ability to fully relish in the linguistic prowess and hypnotic imagination of this collection. And yet, it is impressive how the bilingual presentations ofpoems invite stimulating questions of how and when images and figures are conjured and transformed amidst processes of revision/re-vision—adding to our meditation on the book’s themes while positioning the act of translation as a rich, creative, and spiritual act of communication. I am eager to witness this book to cast its luscious spell on both Korean and English–speaking literary communities.”
–EMILY JUNGMIN YOON, author of Find Me as the Creature I Am
“In Jimin Seo’s debut collection OSSIA, the lyric catches between the art of living and the living of art. Vibrant poems oscillate between languages and queer intimacies, that erotic and operatic space between there and—after a breath—there again.”
–JAY GAO, author of Imperium
"I’m interested in Seo’s desire to sustain a happiness that might exclude him, to offer a loved one the knife they needed, an optimism towards alternatives. Seo is willing to kill off a few younger versions of himself to open the multiverse for others. Ossia is a collection that both recognizes the hubris of the poet and the utility of the creative act. If some poets enter the personal archive seeking belonging, Seo enters bearing speculative gifts that may change the outcome."
–ASA DRAKE, TriQuarterly
“Each poem operates like an individual measure that builds and responds to another, in different variations and across multiple languages, to create strange, intelligent music about art-making and loss.”
–ROSANNA YOUNG OH, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Rather than reveling in the ‘traumatic’ grievances of autobiography, Seo examines with wry and penetrating insight the constitutive role of language in subject formation.”
–CHRISTOPHER KEMPF, Preposition Mag
“OSSIA blends the voices of the dead with the living, resulting in a symphonic exploration into migration, dislocation, familial bonds, love, and loss. Seo textures his manuscript with poems in both Korean and English, reflecting the double experience ofgrowing up in both Seoul, Korea, and the U.S. South, and of queerness.”
–NICOLE W. LEE, Four Way Review