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.
ISBN: 9781939728463
44pp; 6x8", paperback
Author: Joey S. Kim
Joey Kim’s literary prowess is evident though her directness and clarity. Each poem decentralizes the white gaze, as readers become witness to a reality that is so often dismissed. Kim shatters the model minority myth by contextualizing the real lived hardships of Korean-Americans within schools and homes— states and countries. In turn, these places and histories inhabit the body. Kim maps out these terrains as the body becomes the keeper of ancestries, secrets, and long awaited truths.
Joey S. Kim is a scholar, creative writer, and Assistant Professor of English 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," a poem forthcoming in her debut chapbook of poems, Body Facts, and first published in Pleiades.
