Phantom pain wings

Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA)

Winter 2024 Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.