Though the poet Kim Hyesoon began her career as an editor at a South Korean publishing house in the late 1970s, for many contemporary readers, the political circumstances surrounding her vocational beginnings might sound eerily familiar. In his introduction to her most recent collection, Lady No, translator Jack Saebyok Jung describes this time in South Korean history as being ruled by “a regime whose violent whims could ruin lives in a matter of hours—where secret-police-in-all-but-name arrested anyone deemed ideologically threatening.”
Originally released anonymously over the course of eight months in 2014 via posts on the blog of the major South Korean publisher Munhakdongne, Lady No is a collection of experimental prose and poetry (what Kim calls shisanmun, or poetry-prose) that serves as a documentation of Kim’s first and only foray into digital performance art. Set in a fictional land called “Aerok” (a palindrome of Korea), Kim uses the moniker 않아 (pronounced ahn-ah) to explore themes of work, creativity, motherhood, spiritual ennui, and authoritarianism all through her trademark surreal, paradoxical, and often very haunted lens.
A self-described “witch,” Kim alchemizes the ills of her society into imagistic bardos, turning action into stillness and everyday realities into occult contradictions. As Jung writes, at one point, Kim was held by authorities after helping to edit and publish the Korean translation of a biography of American labor organizer Mary G. Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones. Refusing to give the name or whereabouts of the book’s translator, Kim was slapped across the face by her interrogators a total of seven times. Turning suppression into inspiration, Kim used this experience in her work, going on “to write seven poems about the incident, one for each blow.”
All throughout Lady No, Kim uses negation as a literary tool, even beginning with the collection’s title. “To live and write under that regime was to hear again and again the word ‘No,’ ” Jung writes. “As in: ‘No, you cannot write this. No, you cannot discuss this. No, you cannot even think this.’ ” As South Korea modernized, the explicit “No” of censorship and suppression gave way to the pressures and demands that accompanied and fueled the country’s rising and often unchecked capitalist growth. Jung describes how a new kind of “No” took hold, maintaining that “there was no time to slow down in a nation driven by breakneck market expansion.”
And yet, even amidst the injustices and horrors of late-stage capitalism, Kim transmutes the gravity of the political situation into a poetry that pushes against the grain and forces you to slow down. In some ways, Kim’s negation might just be another stand-in for emptiness, or what she refers to in the book’s afterword as a “transparent poetry.” In “What Is Inspiration,” she writes, “There is no poem as good as the one before it is put into words,” and you get a glimpse into the koan-like effigies that make Kim’s work so rich, phantasmic presences beyond being and nothingness.
–Mike Sheffield, web editor
Fiction and Poetry
To write fiction is to record that life is a marvelous lie.
Recording in advance that after you and I disappear, only faint lies
will remain, growing even fainter.
Thus, recording in advance the sight of lies, on a street without ‘I,’
being swept away by other lies.
To write poetry is to witness my death in poetry.
The apex of poetry is the moment of death, the moment when only
death remains in the shape of a mustard seed and all else becomes
absence.
Thus, the act of writing a poem now means to endure while
embracing a firefly-like death with a gentle breath.
Mammal
Before the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, where the air is thin,
I am having an out-of-body experience. And so,
As I watch myself prostrating,
All I can think of is how heavy this mammal’s body must be.
No matter. This sadness is a transparent disinterest. A kind
of gaze.
Lama monks, dressed in white aprons,
Swing blades shaped like half-moons and rectangles
And tenderize the body of the dead.
But the eagles show no signs of favor.
They are annoyed that this
Is what they are getting after being invited here.
Lady No, who comes from a lower town,
Must taste horrible,
And for the first time in her life, she wants to look good for
eagles.
Why is Lady No a mammal that shits and sucks on tits?
Why is Lady No an animal with hot fingers and sticky sweat?
Why is Lady No a female whose tits spill out at loud noises?
Such a burden to carry in life.
The smell of Lady No is so stinky that she fears smelling flowers,
afraid her breath might kill them.
(Why does Lady No have these two long arms?
Please do not give me flowers.
We all come from the earth,
But here is this single blossom of a flower,
Barely opening her eyes after rising from the earth.
If Lady No touches her,
A moment might turn into brutality.
I can’t even dare to stand next to a wide-open flower.)
Fish with Shaven Heads
I spent a night at a Buddhist college for women monks.
A storm was slowly making its way up north that night.
From my sleep, I heard the symphony from the main hall, waking
up the morning.
After the solitary wooden bell awakened all of creation, the
temple’s clear bell roused the living things of the earth, and the muted
wooden clapper stirred the creatures of the water. Finally, the piercing
metallic clang from the kitchen resonated with such a cry that it
awakened the beings of the sky. It was a symposium of sound. After
some words were spoken for the Buddha, the teachers, the parents, and
the masses, a chorus chanted at the temple. When I opened the door,
I saw a part of the temple opening like a lotus made from light amid
the storm. The main hall was a blossom flying brightly as if it were the
storm’s eye.
And in the main hall, women monks with their shaven heads were
chanting, bringing their small hands together like a school of fish.
When the morning came, I opened my umbrella, and I was guided
by the head monk through the garden. When we crossed the paradise
bridge above the valley, the monk told me a story about rain rituals the
women monks used to perform.
When the night of drought comes, the women monks who were
born in the year of the dragon must take a bath in the valley while
wearing cauldron lids on their heads. This always brought rain. How
long did they have to bathe for the rain ritual? Of course, until it rains.
Like waking up all creation with their daybreak prayers, women monks
once woke up the god of rain with their bathing. My umbrella flipped
over, and there were fish in the strong current in the valley, and they
looked like hands brought together in chorus chanting. Shaven-headed
fish didn’t get washed away by the rough waters. They were curled up as
if they were praying.
What Is Inspiration
A student spoke,
“I can’t find inspiration, so I don’t think I will be able to do this
assignment.”
Truly, it’s been such a long time since I heard the word inspiration.
That’s right. There is no poem as good as the one before it is put
into words.
Poetry is written when ‘I’ am staying in another state of being.
Poetry leads ‘I’ into another state of being.
Poetry is found in a different world called the poetic condition.
Of course, the catalyst for divulging is usually moral indignation or
existential alienation,
And the procedure of imagination is often political.
That indignation, that alienation, that hope leads ‘I’
To be in another state of being.
Poetry is the unfolding of another being
And sinking into another state.
It is the shouting of stillness.
Inspiration is the answer one gives when they have heard the words
of the other called ‘I’,
It is the impossibility of that answer.
That is why after a poem has been finished,
It is only right that the ‘I’ in the poem disappears.
After drinking it all up, there remain bits of ‘I’ in the glass.
It would be fortunate if I could leave behind just enough of ‘me’ as
the remnants needed to cast a fortune.
♦
From the book Lady No by Kim Hyesoon. Copyright 2026 by Kim Hyesoon. English translation copyright © 2026 by Jack Saebyok Jung. Originally published as 않아는 이렇게말했다 in Korea in 2022 by Munhakdongne Publishing Group. Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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