DMZ Colony

By Don Mee Choi Description Reviews Winner of the National Book Award Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind. "Reading Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is an experience that plunges into a theatre of words, a theatre of pain in which words are everything… The poet’s presence moves among history, like a phantom without a face… each reading of DMZ Colony enacts a transition of history from within, which calls for individuals to