Rosanna Young Oh

“A  woman pulls a hair from the yolk of an egg. A watermelon rind from  Hokusai looks like flesh. A woodcutter falls in love with an angel. In  poems reminiscent of Jenny Xie, Jack Gilbert, and the haiku writers  translated by Robert Hass, Rosanna Young Oh creates two parallel worlds:  the working class milieu of her father's grocery and the sumptuous  interiority of the poet within. Through poignant glimpses of the poet's  relationship with her father, we see the family as the site of work,  also of myth and melancholy. While these poems are suffused by a  Buddhist searching, the poet has no choice but to cling to the world,  which is where we see beautiful things and love our mother and father.  Rosanna Young Oh's The Corrected Version is a work of stunning clarity, longing, and a painterly eye.”

— Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia

“The tacit questionings in The Corrected Version are brave and forthright: what stories are true? what is love and what  is duty? what are the limits to hope and certainty? The voice in this  collection feels disillusioned from the start, but allows for expansive  identifications, bodily as well as spiritual. In it, we can feel how  well the paradox of desire and duty, or the inner life swelling and the  external world diminishing, fits our sense of things if we care to  notice. Up against the explicitly meditative or discursive moments in  these poems, we often come upon an indelible image, such as ‘the squid  lie in golden halves among the coals, / like kites sparking in black  clouds of firelight.’ It is no epiphanic image, and as such, a searching  inquiry is mesmerizingly, hauntingly felt.”

— Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing

“Poetry  worth our time and money must rise from the words like a siren’s song,  luring us, and it must enchant us with tales that break our hearts, as  if that is the only truth, and it must leave us with hope, so we can  dream. The dream is always about freedom and survival and love, the song  about what life’s real costs are. Rosanna Young Oh’s brilliant first  collection of poems, The Corrected Version,  is the best kind of poetry—fresh, ambitious, sardonic, wise,  bittersweet, efficient with edges—the kind that says I am worth paying  attention to. Trust me, reader, Oh is that and more.”

— Dave Smith, author of Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry

“The speaker of Rosanna Young Oh’s first poetry collection, The Corrected Version,  serves as a bridge between two distinctly different cultures which the  poet manages only through her emotional commitment to living and feeling  both sides, deeply. This modulation between cultures, this intricate  balancing act fed by Korean myth, folktales, proverbs and classical  Korean poetry on one side, and its astute, cleverly sardonic take on  American culture on the other, is what gives this collection its soul.  An elegance of diction and muscular figures of speech throughout betray a  shocking intimacy of sprit that draws me into these poems where some  uneasy things are revealed, but finely contrasted with a variety of  allusions to Eastern and Western literary and philosophical traditions  that mitigate. This is also a carefully packaged family epic as well,  the characters emerging throughout and taking their place within the  tableau that is the unfolding of this collection. Yeah, it’s that good,  and driven by a maturity of vision that can be learned only if you are  willing to relinquish yourself to language, and to the force that is  poetry.”

— Bruce Weigl, author of Among Elms, in Ambush