Descriptive Comments from Back Cover

"These eloquent poems…address the reader with an unswerving mix of music and vivid pain. These are poems of desolation and absence, political in the largest sense and private in the truest…. They mark the emergence of an exciting new voice."
- Eavan Boland

"I am deeply moved and instructed by Suji Kwock Kim's Brilliant debut collection, which moves fluently between the living and the dead, the Korean past and the Asian American present. Notes from the Divided Country is a heartfelt and blood-soaked work of flights and explorations, of personal probings and historical exposures, of suffering and responsibility, of tribute and witness, of American soul-making."
- Edward Hirsch

"Notes from a Divided Country is a beautiful book of which an entire people, we undivided Americans, can be deeply proud. Kim's brilliantly crafted, brave new poems move us into an emotional union with the seemingly far-flung past of Korea's political geography…. What voice, what witness, what glorious descendancy."
- Garrett Hongo

Notes from a Divided Country spring out of a civil war in the soul….[Its] revelation of horror is so explicit, so necessary; a facing up to history that frees the speaker…. To understand the gift of the senses is a blessing. It is a graceful, powerful trope…. There's love and sadness at the root of these poems. There is also a bridge, a language that mends."
- Yusef Komunyakaa, from his judge's citation

Background on Suji Kwock Kim