Penury by Myung Mi Kim Reviewed by Eric Weinstein
pen • u • ry [pen-yuh-ree] — noun 1. extreme poverty; destitution.
Myung Mi Kim’s Penury instantiates exactly that: a poetics of extreme and devastating lack, an inadequacy and insufficiency of language designed to mirror the extraordinary poverty of its subject(s). The disenfranchised, the disillusioned, the war-ravaged, the unhomed—all speak haltingly together in and through Kim’s fifth full-length collection to paradoxically communicate to the reader the incommunicability of human brutality and loss, the permanent isolation inherent in human experience and language, and the insoluble lacuna that come part and parcel with translation, even when one is translating from English to English. While this book-length poem gradually reveals more and more as it progresses, the first several pages are daunting and the starkness of the language surpasses the minimalistic to border on the incomprehensible. There are moments of heartbreaking clarity—“the place I’m from is no longer on any map,” “the dead have no navels,”—but Penury frequently strays into the impenetrable and unpronounceable:
In some passages of the text, words are actually printed atop one another, rendering them illegible. Granted, Penury claims for itself on its opening page a “Stave / For which no pronunciation exists,” but there is a difference between a postmodern elegance, a strong economy of language—clear elements of Kim’s earlier collections, notably Under Flag—and literal reductio ad absurdum. Indeed, it’s as if Kim has boiled her earlier work to the point where the most essential aspects are not necessarily all that’s left, but merely the most resilient; that is, meaning is not always preserved. There is an emotional salience to Penury overall, but it is more than hard-won. Perhaps this is the goal. This collection is certainly a challenge, less so for readers more oriented toward visual poetry than those with a predilection for the auditory/oral traditions. While there’s much to appreciate in Penury and something new to unlock in every (re)reading, ultimately, the necessary insufficiency of the language and difficulty of the poetry in general will dissuade all but the most committed readers.
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Prick of the Spindle Poetry Editor Eric Weinstein's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of online and print publications, including Best New Poets 2009. His poems have been nominated for inclusion in the annual Pushcart Prize anthology and have won several awards, including the Anne Flexner Award in poetry. A native of Nashua, New Hampshire, he currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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