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.
From the Author, Joey S. Kim
My work is reflective, confessional, anxious, and tries to make sense of the confusion of inhabiting a body and world that does not recognize me fully. Body Facts interweaves personal experiences, traumas, memories, historical events, and Korean history and aesthetics. It uses poetry as a vessel to give form to the ineffableness of the many things I regularly ponder or experience.
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
