Poetry At The Print Room

(This is a past event and is no longer running)

Readings from Don Mee Choi and Denise Riley. This event will also launch Modern Poetry in Translation’s Korean issue The Blue Vein.

Don Mee Choi was born in Korea, but settled in the USA.  She is a poet, critic and essayist and in experimental and important work she challenges notions of history and identity. She is one of Korean poetry’s foremost translators and her translations of Kim Hyesoon are published by Bloodaxe. Her last collection of poetry, Hardly War was published to acclaim in 2016. The New York Times said of Hardly War:

‘Deliberately and excitingly difficult in both its style and its subject matter, Don Mee Choi’s second collection, “Hardly War,” sees its author operating as an archaeologist as much as a poet. Choi’s use of hybrid forms — poetry, memoir, opera libretto, images and artifacts from her father’s career as a photojournalist in the Korean and Vietnam Wars — lets her explore themes of injustice and empire, history and identity, sifting through the detritus of family, translation, propaganda and dislocation.’

http://www.donmeechoi.com

Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. Her books include War in the Nursery [1983]; ‘Am I that Name?’ [1988]; The Words of Selves [2000]; Denise Riley: Selected Poems [2000]; The Force of Language, with Jean-Jacques Lecercle [2004]; Impersonal Passion [2005], Time Lived, Without Its Flow [2012] and Say Something Back [2016]. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and and of Poetry at the University of East Anglia, and has taught and researched widely at many institutions in Europe and America.. Her visiting positions have included A.D. White Professor at Cornell University in the US, Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck College in the University of London. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing. Denise Riley lives in London.

‘Denise Riley’s new collection Say Something Back is a moving reminder that she’s one of the best poets around.’- Andrew Motion, The Guardian

‘A classic of feminist intellectual history. Am I That Name? is a sort of Anglo-American end of innocence for anyone who tries to speak of ‘women.’ Riley makes the word run, since she cannot make it stand still. She offers a history of how feminism has faced its paradoxical core.’- Voice Literary Supplement