The persona that moves through Alone with Seoul is a shadow, an observer in two foreign lands—South Korea, where the poet is an incomer, and the land of love, from which the poet has stepped aside. There are griefs here that run deep and there is the hard nugget of knowing survival. There is the unflinching honesty that absence, pain and the drama it brings can become a comforting place to hide, that giving these up is a deeper and different loss, one that may allow love to arrive again one day:
not as tempest, not as fire to burn me clean, but as quiet, steady light.
Silence and solitude, the temptations of self-destruction and the ways we navigate an often alienating world thread through poems that are exquisitely pared to the essentials of a lucid image and a perfect phrase. Poems that are enhanced by fragments of translation into South Korean. A distinctive, elegant debut.