Description: "Kim Hyun's Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection. Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim's fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making. His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures. They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithetical to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns. After all, like LGBTQ+ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence. Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyun's form. Glory Hole invites readers into a very queer world."--
Brief description: By day, Archana Madhavan is a technical writer helping people to make data-driven decisions. By night, she is a fitful writer and a budding translator of Korean literature and comics.
Review Quotes: "As a whole [these poems] showcase a singular creative mastery. With as little interference as possible, the translators facilitated a smooth transition from Korean to English, maintaining the richness of the original. The point and the goal of the pieces that make up Glory Hole is to invite the impenetrable and the subversive into the light."-- "Foreword"