Freely Frayed
- Author: Don Mee Choi (United States)
- Book type: poems, essays
- Publisher: And Other Stories
- To be released: November 17, 2026
- Length: 114 pages
- Format: paperback
- Prize: £ 14.99
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Don Mee Choi Freely Frayed reviews and information
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- “Choi shifts her focus from individual linguistic dislocation to the semantics of empire. She lingers on the cyclical nature of colonial conflict, the division of history into that which can be mourned and that which must be forgotten. In plain terms she describes this phenomenon, stating, “Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony.” (Annabelle Johnson, Los Angeles Review of Books, on Mirror Nation)
Blurb of the book with poems and essays by Don Mee Choi
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. 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.
Don Mee Choi is a translator and highly innovative poet. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Incorporating archives, photographs and fragments of memory, Choi’s poetry explores historical events and the human impact of war. Her books include DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.