Hardly War

I wasn't necessarily a fan of this. I think I could've spent more time thinking about the poems, but the meaning of most was pretty direct (I am sure I missed a lot, though). The usage of children's songs and stuff was really nice and I am a fan of chapter 18 because it made me chuckle. I loved that......more

While I was growing up in Hong Kong, I saw more of my father’s photographs than of my father because he was always away in various war zones. He would bring back photographs of the wars he saw, then leave again. He also left us a map, a wall-sized map of Southeast Asia, framed and hung above our......more

The way adverbs and equations functioned in this was cool. Both are like equivocation, or transference, the actors of violence slipping from Japan to US to DPRK or ROK itself. Rly interesting and sad the idea of the neocolonys colony, the ROK troops sent to Vietnam I found this interesting but didn’t......more

Hardly War belongs to that class of contemporary poetry with which I tend to find more in common with contemporary gallery art than traditional poetics, as such. By this, I mean (1) that it is as much an aesthetic and visual artifact as a linguistic one, (2) that it cultivates an aura of oblique aff......more

My review for the New York Times Book Review: [URL not allowed]......more