Glory Hole by Kim Hyun

Paperback. Seagull Books. 2022. New condition. 

Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole is the first Korean queer poetry collection. Featuring gay teens, elders, cats, caterpillars, robots, and other unexpected characters, Kim’s fifty-one eccentric poems trace themes of love, sexual desire, abandonment, destitution, and death. In recounting the splendid yet tragic journeys of his speakers, Kim defies meaningful sense-making. His poems are a mishmash of dystopian sci-fi and pornography, storytelling and poetry, fictive references, and real figures. They are not embellished with elegant imagery; in fact, they are antithecal to it, opting instead for incoherent tense, unidiomatic expressions, and never-ending puns. After all, like LGBTQ people in many cultures, Korean queers live in this site of violence. Bewilderment, deliberately, is Kim Hyun’s form. Glory Hole invites readers into a very queer world.