The way this poem is arranged on the page could be called translative typography, a sort of Rosetta Stone of intentionality for bilingual readers. For the monolinguists, this juxtaposition of Korean and English inverts subalternity, so that the English reader is left with a post-colonial deference. As a caveat, this positionality may shift for a Korean poet engaging with the work. 

 

In one of the “OSSIA” poems a rhetorical question – which is a frequent formal gesture – is offered: “What use is language when the ancients divide us into our final haunted constellations?” And then expanded upon: “Look up and see a mirror of what’s already here! How comical to read stars into accident and present into future and mean it!” (38). This intellectual dance around poetic expression is one of the book’s central interrogations. The “OSSIA” poems create a syncretic space wherein multiple identities and influences coexist within a layered and multifaceted exploration of memory, loss, and cultural identity.

 

At the same time, the dialectic elegies for Richard Howard disambiguate a hegemonic discourse of the eros inherent in mentorship. In these poems, their relationship is marked formally by the direct address that not only serves as delightful clarity but also demonstrates their status: “My friend, . . .” the voice of the mentor begins; “Richard, . . .” the voice of the mentee begins. The friction between these formal boundaries – in both academia and in the poem – catalyzes the dire emotional intensity as we watch their narrative unfold through the collection.

 

One of these poems is arranged on the page such that the “Richard . . .” part of the poem comes first, the title underneath “RICHARD ASKS TO SORT BOOKS TOGETHER” and the “My friend, . . .” part of the poem underneath that with a Korean translation on the facing page (28-29). Seo employs this shifting arrangement throughout the collection, keeping the dialectic they offer vibrant and twisting, and then from here the dialectic between these elements enlightens the subject further: “Richard, to do nothing at last is to say the world / is at war again.” and then from Richard: “Art does something at last. A counter weight” (28). This constant balancing and rebalancing of formal elements in OSSIA resonates in the text’s subject and formal expression. 

 

Some of the Richard Howard poems seem also to question how grief relates to nostalgia, while at the same time they investigate the ways in which memory is integral to the activation of that very grief: “what will my body kill to mend the well / -spring of my mind? What is forgettable?” (64). Again, the rhetorical questions provide a harrowing formal element that expresses the physical confrontation of the death of Richard Howard’s own memory as a result of Lewy-Body dementia. This book’s reanimation of voices, psyches, and interhuman experiences makes Ossia shockingly brutal in its emotional accuracy. 

 

After all this, Ossia explodes, and the political subject widens and energizes in the climactic sonnet crown. To pull quotations from it would be an injustice; the poem should be experienced in its entirety. Each part ripples with nimble musicality that spills over into an etymological linguistic ruckus while overtly addressing major themes throughout the book – and for those English monolinguists, the Korean on the facing page is a translation of the first line of each sonnet. There’s also a satisfying moment of translative typography to help close the sonnet crown.  

 

It’s rare in the U.S. to have a debut collection of poems that is immediately accessible to a non-English speaking audience. Hopefully, this book crosses the Pacific and engages with Korean readers, an appropriate homecoming for a book that, in Jimin Seo’s own words, “is an effort to give my native language currency in opposition, and in harmony, with American English. I want to look at, and have the reader look at, language as an expression of power.”