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The World's Lightest Motorcycle by Yi Won
Winner of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea Grand Prize
Finalist for the Big Other Book Award in Translation Yi Won confronts a wired, technological world, often in the mirror, in these inventive, daring and subversive poems. A successor to Korean feminist poets like Kim Hyesoon, Yi Won frequently writes about the perilousness of maintaining one’s human identity in a high-tech, digital environment. In this debut book in English, her poems range from avant-garde prose poems to more lyrical (if dark) free verse, as she examines isolation, loneliness, death, and the passage of time — and in the process, upends polite society and Korean literary culture. Translated from Korean by E. J. Koh & Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello Zephyr Press | Bilingual (Korean & English) | ISBN: 978-1-938890-84-0 |
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Reviews & Interviews |
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Yi Won is one of the most fascinating and exciting poets to emerge after the oppressive decades of South Korea’s military dictatorship. Her renowned and influential predecessor, Kim Hyesoon, notes that “young Korean women poets are developing a terrain of poetry that is combative, visceral, subversive, inventive, and ontologically feminine.” Yi Won’s highly inventive poetry creates a new surreal terrain in which bodies and everyday objects, capitalist commodities, exist side by side and interact, often violently. E. J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, two brilliant Korean American poets, have invented astonishing language for Yi Won’s subversive poetry. —Don Mee Choi
Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle arrives like a photon in E.J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s agile, radiant translation. With consummate lightness, Yi Won’s poetry reveals the double potential in everything—the radical intimacy of the seemingly distant, the radical newness of the close-to-hand. In Yi Won’s line of sight, the universe is truly expanding; not just the elevator, but the floor itself is rising, heaven and earth change places, the inkdrop gleams like a cat’s eye. Jump up, jump on, jump in! —Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne |
Poetry Foundation: "The Places Bodies Can't Reach" by Mia You (August 16, 2021)
The Adroit Journal: "The Cosmos in the Daffodils: A Conversation with Translators E.J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello about The World's Lightest Motorcycle" by Tiffany Troy (March 21, 2022) Asymptote: "Poets with Poets on Poetry: Stine An, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, and E.J. Koh in Dialogue" by Darren Huang ( March 23, 2022) |
About the Author and Translators
Yi Won is a South Korean avant-garde poet and essayist, born in 1968 in Gyeonggi-do. She studied Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and earned her master’s degree at the Graduate School of Culture and Arts at Dongguk University. Her poetry debuted in 1992, and she received the Contemporary Poetics Award (2002), Contemporary Poetry Award (2005), Opening the World with Poetry Award (2014), The Beginning Award (2014), The Equity Literature Award (2018), and the Poet Town Literary Award (2018). Her books include When They Ruled the Earth (1996), A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! (2001), The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (2007), The History of an Impossible Page (2012), Let Love be Born (2017), and I Am My Affectionate Zebra (2018). She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Academy of American Poets, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and World Literature Today. Koh is the recipient of Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, Kundiman, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, among others. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation and is completing her PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. She has received poetry fellowships from several organizations, and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The Sun, and more. She is on the advisory board for Sundress Publications, and is program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.
E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and the memoir The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Academy of American Poets, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and World Literature Today. Koh is the recipient of Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, Kundiman, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, among others. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation and is completing her PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. She has received poetry fellowships from several organizations, and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The Sun, and more. She is on the advisory board for Sundress Publications, and is program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.