: :
Stamped by purse. Bone soldered. Labor open.
Light and propagation. That stolent. Tormet a sum
of pieces prices.
Bodies in propulsion. Guatemalan, Koren, African-American
sixteen year olds working check-out lanes. Hard and noisy
enunciation.
A banter English gathers carriers.
What is nearest is destroyed.
Conceived as one long poem, Myung Mi Kim's Dura (1998, Sun & Moon Press) is a whirling experimentatal symphony of images, forms and rhythms assembled and juxtaposed to translate the experience and gestures of the Korean immigrant woman surviving in America at the end of the twentieth century. Composed of seven sequences of various lengths (the page of text below comes from the section called "Thirty and Five Books"), Dura unfolds as one long poem registering tenuous yet tenacious links between cultures and languages that necessitates an on-going "translation" between here/there, east/west, singular/collective, and subjugation and liberation. Kim has also written Under Flag and The Bounty.