Description: Freely Frayed gathers early poems, recent essays, and translation notes by National Book Award winning poet Don Mee Choi.
Featuring Choi's radical modes of writing back to empire, the collection offers both the underpinnings of her acclaimed KOR-US trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation) and the intersecting points of personal experience and memory that have evolved during the time of writing the books. Freely Frayed grapples with the politics of distance and language in exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity, illustrating memory's enactment of translation and a notion of salvage that creates a dialogue between forms. This book continues to deepen and broaden Choi's relentlessly inventive and radical anti-colonial project - both as a standalone book and as a companion to the trilogy. Choi's "disobedient vocabulary" exposes impossible connections and fusions that allow for radically imagined futures. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place and language, and in turn to ask what history is built from this record. Freely Frayed contains two highly sought-after and no longer in print pamphlets, "Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode" (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) and "Freely Frayed, ᄏ=q, & Race=Nation" (Wave Pamphlet, 2015).Brief description: Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: Mirror Nation (2024), which won the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award; the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (2020); and Hardly War (2016). She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon's poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. She was the 2024 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence at CalArts and Bain-Swiggett Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University. She currently resides in Berlin.
Review Quotes: >Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but "during the Korean War cranes had no place to land." Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all "victims of History," so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.
--Judges' citation, National Book Award
--Publishers Weekly To read the work of Don Mee Choi is to readjust our vision--not only of the modern world at war and violence sustained at borders, but also of how war and borders shape our language and percolate into the art that we see. Her poetry is one that will not be confined within the margins of a book, but spill into drawings, photographs, videos, and passports.
--Sohini Basak, Wasafiri Choi's hybrid structure allows her, in some sense, to have it both ways--to look at her subjects while simultaneously, and paradoxically, showing that some subjects are just too big to see in full: war, your parents' life before and without you, your government and its decisions.
--Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Sunday Book Review Her writing has showed me that discomfort is neither cruel nor condemnation, but a passageway towards freedom, or towards becoming feral, or freely frayed.
--Christine Shan Shan Hou, Lit Hub