Event Type

Experience the poetry of two contemporary Korean poets in this bilingual reading: Lee Jenny, who has pushed Korean poetry to new horizons by shaping waves of language into poetic, auditory rhythms that go beyond meaning; and Yoo Heekyung who is well known for revealing the strangeness of the world through the unfamiliar feelings and sensations found in our daily lives. Lee Jenny and Yoo Heekyung will read from their poetry collections Pirowa Padowa (Saturnalia Books, 2025) and Today's Morning Vocabulary (Zephyr Press, 2025), respectively, and will be joined by their English translators Archana Madhavan and Stine An. Lee’s poetry deconstructs conventional grammar and syntax to expand our universal notions of language. Yoo’s poetry are songs about death and memory; volition and the unfixed; loneliness and loss—human conditions that cannot mix but are not opposed to each other. You are invited to explore a new world, one that has stemmed from Korean and grown beyond language.

NOHC 204