The astonishing poetry collection The Hell of That Star enlivens the horror of Korean life under U.S.-backed authoritarianism. Poems of blows and vomit, births and coffins alternate blithe confidence and trembling terror.

"Out of charred books, the censor's black coal tar, 'the whip of the word,' in The Hell of That Star Kim Hyesoon enacts one woman's experience of and resistance to the neocolonial U.S.-sponsored dictatorship in postwar South Korea, with its relentless censorship, police brutality, economic exploitation, and martial law. Kim imagines a 'language without language,' the placeless place of the 'midstness' of life and death, visceral, intestinal, with curse-words spat like seeds, pus seeping from eyes, a 'corpse heavier than the whole world', 'I—I—I—I—I.' Her fierce interrogations of empire and patriarchy, the grotesque violence and violations of a woman's life under an authoritarian regime, are embodied by an utterly original, unique voice—raw, sardonic, scatological, agonized, enacting the emotional extremity one finds in ancient tragedy. As Michael Scammell, commenting on Mikhail Sholokhov's The Quiet Don, observed: 'The greater the original, the more translations it can bear.' Kim Hyesoon is blessed to have as her collaborators in English brilliant poet-translators; Ok's translation is a work of true translatus, carrying-across Kim's ferocity and extremity into an English of commensurate intensity, inventiveness, and strangeness, restless in its questioning, transforming anguish and anger into expanding possibility."
—Suji Kwock Kim, author of Notes from the Divided Country and Notes from the North