Kim Min Jeong

Translated from the Korean by Soeun Seo and Jake Levine
What you doing?
Sharpening a knife.
Is something up?
I said I'm sharpening a knife.
Did I do something?
No. I'm just sharpening a knife.
Exactly, you're sharpening a knife.
I'm not allowed to use my whetstone?
I didn't know you had a whetstone.
I bought a whetstone, a hoe, a sickle, and a dog leash. What you gonna do about it?
I won't ask. You sharpen your knives.
It's not working. Can you buy me more?

Whether born with it or not, she found her hidden talent.
She sharpened her knives
and became a bitch.
One person
a pity party
pumped up
and pop!

Let's not do this.
from the journal BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW
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Color photograph (exterior) of Divya Victor sitting in a garden
"Solidarity, Motherhood and Immigration"

Poet Divya Victor talks about her transnational experiences. "I realized that alienation is not inherent; alienation has legal and bureaucratic sources that I needed to observe....And that’s why the poems about inter-racial parenting and birthing are also about geopolitical control, and fabricated national borders"

via MS. MAGAZINE
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Cover of Ellen Bryant Voigt's book, Messenger
What Sparks Poetry: 
Martin Mitchell on Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger

"She is a poet of control and precision; across decades and amid differing poetical movements, Voigt is steadfast in her adherence to a clear-eyed iambic elegy—an elegy defined most strikingly by her devotion to unsentimental self-interrogation and her equally unflinching assessments of public life."
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