Body Facts tells the story of a speaker who is Korean, American, woman, and body. It weaves together Korean history and aesthetics, the speaker’s childhood and family stories, U.S. foreign policy with North Korea, and the things we do and shouldn’t do to our bodies.
Joey Kim’s collection, Body Facts, dynamically assesses the tolls that racism, war, and capitalism take on our abilities to freely dream, to revel in the differing intricacies of identity. Kim’s work, from multiple angles, portrays the ways in which peace and beauty are forced to find new escapes from tyrants and the fallouts of their power. Kim admirably illustrates present and historical threats, all while rendering the ageless brilliance of family and spirit.
— Marcus Jackson, author of Pardon My Heart, the 2019 Ohioana Book Award winner for Poetry
Joey S. Kim is a scholar, creative writer, and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo. Her poetry ventures through Korean history, the feminine body, U.S. foreign policy, and coming-of-age in midwestern America. She researches nineteenth-century global Anglophone literature and poetics. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pleiades: Literature in Context, Burningword Literary Journal, Essays in Romanticism, and elsewhere. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee for her poem "Plunder," which was first published in Pleiades and is forthcoming in her debut chapbook of poems, Body Facts. Twitter: @Joeykim
