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Jane Miller loves poetry. In these provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Federico García Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem. Miller explores the use of the question mark in the history of poetry and its function as a revelation of poetic voice. She considers the positive and negative aspects of surrealism on the contemporary poem, its anti-feminist origins in France, its contemporary usage, and the benefits of super-real images. Miller examines how identity politics might affect the imagination. She describes ancient Chinese musical instruments to show how their sounds resonate off/in American poems and on the aural integrity of the lyric poem. She interrogates the political implications of language and the degeneration and regeneration of words. Finally, in an essay about what she dares not say about poetry, she comes out against forms of surrealism, narrative, jargon, rhetoric, irony, and appropriation. This masterful work can be read as advice to a young writer, but it also invites us into the mind of a writer who has developed her craft through the course of a lifetime of writing, reading, and exploring the world, showing not only the ideas that influenced her—feminist, lesbian, and international works—but also how Miller has, in turn, influenced ideas.

Kim Myeong-sun is Korea's first published woman writer. Fruit of Life: Poems (생명의 과실: 김명순 시선) is the first book-length, Korean-to-English translation of her poetry. Kim’s poems offer a raw portrait of 1920s–30s Korea, driven by her personal experiences of sexual assault, misogynistic journalism and criticism, displacement, and poverty during the Japanese colonial occupation (1910–1945). Alongside feminist critique, Kim also writes about sapphic desire, familial affection, and nature, in styles that range from the traditional to the experimental. While Kim’s work was erased from the canon by Korea’s misogynistic literary establishment, Fruit of Life celebrates the legacy of Kim’s radical, versatile poetry, which paved the way for contemporary Korean women writers.
 

English-Korean Bilingual Edition 
영-한 이중언어판

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

‘한국 여성 최초 등단 작가’ 김명순의 시가 영문 완역본 『생명의 과실: 김명순 시선』으로 영어권 독자들을 만난다. 1920–30년대 조선 사회의 민낯을 강렬하고 가감 없는 언어로 담아낸 김명순의 시는, 일제강점기 아래 성폭력과 여성혐오적 언론 및 비평, 이주와 빈곤을 직접 겪어낸 작가의 여성주의적·반식민주의적 저항 정신을 생생히 드러낸다. 또한 전통과 실험을 넘나드는 다채로운 형식과 기법으로 여성 간 연대와 사랑, 가족애, 자연에 대하여 노래한다. 『생명의 과실: 김명순 시선』은 여성혐오적 문단으로부터 소외당한 김명순의 작품을 재조명하며, 한국 여성문학의 새로운 지평을 연 그의 업적을 기념한다.