Kim Hye Soon’s Autobiography of Death, translated by Don Mee Choi, is an act of commuting to-and-fro two worlds beyond their own border: lifedeath without space, nor virgule and slash. “Death is something that storms in from of the outside. The universe inside is bigger. It’s deep. Soon you float up inside it,” says the narrator in “Commute.” A reviewer, Rochelle Hurt, writes how the book “enacts poetic necromancy–not to communicate with the dead, who are perhaps beyond our reach, but with death itself.” Death bears layered meanings: the action or fact of dying or being killed; the state of being dead; the permanent ending of vital processes; the personification of the power that destroys life. I think more about the latter one, in top of the top of the others. Again, layers. Kim uses the second personal pronoun “you,” a pointing voice that sounds grieving, reckoning, protesting, stripping the flesh. The “you” change as pages unfold, making the death visible as the spirit of disembodiment. The self, when stripped out of the body, is no longer one. “I’ve split into two but I’m alive / I’ve split into five but I’m alive // In sync with rhythm, I’m me then not me //”

The push and pull of leaving and coming makes the poetry collection feels like a slow murmuring sound surrounding and responding with events of unliving and dying. “After you’ve gone don’t go, don’t / After you’ve come don’t come, don’t //” The poet doesn’t expect her words to stay, being condensed, become solid. Her words do not need explanation. In translation, words, syntaxes, punctuations are already changed. What readers need is sometimes to trust and lean on, other times to bid farewell. “God is love, you’re farewell / You were born from farewell and die of farewell //” The missing of lives are not beautiful. Death is inevitable but never is natural. Someone make death, someone commit to it, to kill women, children, the powerless. A butterfly with wings even still suffer from oblivion. “Your wings flutter like ripples on the water / Now are you liberated from yourself? // Your feet have no prints / Your happiness has no breathe / Your letter has no name //” Everyday in repetition, a knife on your neck. “Every, every day is the eve of death”

But death, even when it becomes a structure, is rarely an eternal damnation. Blurry, shadowy images are everywhere through ambiguous phrases and fantastical images as Fi Jae Lee’s drawings accompany the poems. “vertigo without privacy.” “the silvery alligator in your throat.” “the sky is inside of a grave.” The vividness of claustrophobic horror, painful breathlessness, and seizure of rhythm do not make the death become a gratitious figure. By encountering darkness, “a voice emerges from the center of a beam light.” It vibrates “that feeling of my soul getting yanked.” Between the content of existence and the lacking out of abandonment, the death is simultaneously proximate and at distance.

Asphyxiation
          DAY FORTY-SIX

Hence breath
Then breath
Next breath
Subsequent breath
Because breath
Such breath
And breath
Same breath
Thereafter breath
Thus breath
Always breath
Eventually breath
Perpetually breath
Yet breath
However breath
Therefore breath
In spite of breath
Breath till the bitter end 

Death breathes and you dream but 

it's time to remove the ventilator from death
it's time to shatter the dream with a hammer

In her conversation with Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon shares her thinking-feeling process of writing these poems. “Poetry’s climax is that moment when you discover the absence of everything–only a mustard-seed-like death remains. These poems began at the moment when death cut across our bodies, at the moment of power’s violent act, its pus bursting, cornering us into murderous disparate events, but in the end, I have merely jotted down the rhythm, what the universe of death was spewing out, weeping inside each event. Why? Because rhythm is the face of death.” Nothing’s left. The words have vaporized. Nothing remains. The “I” had died, been killed, murdered, taken away. What’s left, what awaited is poetry, poetry that makes a ghost. We’re that collective ghost.