Poet Blood

Poet Blood

by Kim Kyung Ju

translated by Jake Levine

33 pages, paper, staple bound

cover image courtesy of the author

Toad Press, 2017. $5.00

You can purchase a copy of Poet Blood here.

Kim Kyung Ju was born in space. He arrived on earth in the late 1970s in Korea. He stayed there and wrote poems and some say he became the most important poet of his generation. He won the Kim Soo Young prize and a whole bunch of other prizes. He was blacklisted by the government though, so sometimes he writes using a pen name.

 
Jake Levine ended up in Korea and started translating poems there. Which is strange. There is no logic or reason. It was just something to do, so he did it. Kim Kyung Ju liked radiohead and he likes radiohead and they met at the radiohead fan club after Kim Kyung Ju translated Radiohead philosophy. He misses Tucson and his family at Spork Press.

"i was so enthralled and puzzled. i was terrified and brave. i’d close the book and open it. i opened it more than i closed it. for me, at times, it was more important than anything else and i’d delay life just to read it a fifth time.
i liked it when reindeer crawled across my lips the most." -John Thompson