Freely Frayed

The National Book Award-winning poet's radical new poems and essays explore the intersections of memory, translation and anti-colonial identity

The National Book Award-winning poet's radical new poems and essays explore the intersections of memory, language, translation and anti-colonial identity

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 an exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity, illustrating memory’s enactment of translation and a notion of salvage that creates a dialogue between forms. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place, and in turn to ask what history is built from this record.