Shape of Boy

Lee Sumyeong
Translated from the Korean by Colin Leemarshall

A boy is dragged along the floor.People passing by are good.It is good that the people passing byabove the wallwithout any news happen to change frequently.Notices stick one after another.Vertebrates appear one after another.We wear our team colors and burst out laughing untilsome death-defying boy becomes our predominance.When wearing the team colorsa boy is dragged along the floor.Recognition will be possible again.The things we failed to recognizewill be possible somehow to recognize again.Come let’s unfold a boylet’s push a boy throughcertain to have a boy’s round head when falling from the roof.Houses jutting prominently at different angleson some floor of the houses a boy is drowned.It will be easy to repair the boy. But a boy is dragged along the floor. 소년의 형태소년이 바닥에 끌린다.지나가는 사람들이 좋다.담장 위로아무 소식 없이지나가는 사람들이 실제로 자주 바뀌는 게 좋다.잇달아 게시물들이 붙는다.잇달아 척추동물이 나타난다.죽음을 극복한 어느 소년이 우리에게 우세해지도록우리는 깔깔대며 단체복을 입는다.단체복을 입으면소년이 바닥에 끌린다.다시 알아볼 수 있을 것이다.우리가 몰라보던 것들을어쩌면 알아볼 수 있을 것이다.이리 와서 소년을 펼치자소년을 강행하자지붕에서 떨어질 때는 어김없이 둥근 소년의 머리를 가진다.다른 각도에서 마구 튀어나오는 주택들주택의 어느 바닥에 소년이 잠겨 있다.소년을 쉽게 고칠 수 있을 것이다. 그러나 소년이바닥에 끌린다.

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Lee Sumyeong is a South Korean poet and critic. Since her 1994 debut in the magazine Writer’s World, she has gone on to publish eight books of poetry and several critical and essayistic works. Her writing has won multiple literary prizes, including the Yi Sang Poetry Award and the Kim Chun-su Poetry Award. Just Like, her first collection in English (trans. Colin Leemarshall), was awarded the 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.

Colin in park

Colin Leemarshall runs the print-on-demand press Erotoplasty Editions, which sells innovative and idiosyncratic books of poetry at cost price. His book of visually inflected poems, The Compleat Nidors, is available from Crater Press. 

Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics.

These poems build strikingly on the breakthroughs of Korean forebears like Yi Sang and Oh Kyu-won. They also establish Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation: her problematized "repetitions" chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton. Marked by a distinctive voice and approach, Just Like introduces a brilliant and singular contemporary Korean writer into English.

The poems of Lee Sumyeong's Just Like evince a striking tension between clarity and complexity. Purged of any heightened diction or preciously wrought syntax, Lee's writing can give the impression of being austere to the point of crystallinity. But it is the opposite-a teeming space where concrete objects become unstable and where simple propositions constantly buckle and fissure.

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