A Lesser Love
Poems
In A Lesser Love, Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry Winner, readers find poems composed of "Ingredients for Memories that Can Be Used as Explosives" and those composed of chemistry equations that convert light into "reasonable dioxide" then further transmogrify into a complex parent-child relationship.
"Love, war and recovered testimony from Korea's unhealed border inform the formal and imaginative boundaries within Koh's panoptic poems. Koh imagines the details of her CIA file, revises the Pledge of Allegiance, and translates Beyoncé." —D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, Or A Guide for Boys
“Koh, whose distinctive voice can startle as it soothes, whose invention is a book that delights, disrupts, razes, edifies, and refuses ever to be just one thing. A Lesser Love is first-rate, intelligent, and pure gold—a triumph.” —Timothy Donnelly, The Problem of the Many
"Born from the pain of immigration, the pain of immigrant parents—their relentless labor for survival, their neglected children. Koh is an inheritor of Korea's violent history, her language is crevassed with historical anger, loss, and violence." —Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony
"Unshirking, Koh’s verse is spare, evocative, and gut-moving, drawing out into interludes of clever reflections on cultural place." —World Literature Today
"Every new poem begins with a cooing excitement, a chance to make things right. Every birth is an opportunity to take revenge... Koh reminds us the choice is ours to make, every single time." —Seattle Review of Books
ISBN: 978-0807167779
Pages: 88