by Don Mee Choi (Author)
Freely Frayed gathers early poems, recent essays, and translation notes by National Book Award winning poet Don Mee Choi.
Featuring Choi's radical modes of writing back to empire, the collection offers both the underpinnings of her acclaimed KOR-US trilogy (Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation) and the intersecting points of personal experience and memory that have evolved during the time of writing the books. Freely Frayed grapples with the politics of distance and language in exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity, illustrating memory's enactment of translation and a notion of salvage that creates a dialogue between forms. This book continues to deepen and broaden Choi's relentlessly inventive and radical anti-colonial project - both as a standalone book and as a companion to the trilogy. Choi's "disobedient vocabulary" exposes impossible connections and fusions that allow for radically imagined futures. Simultaneously restless and playful, these poems and essays move us to inspect our own sense of place and language, and in turn to ask what history is built from this record. Freely Frayed contains two highly sought-after and no longer in print pamphlets, "Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode" (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) and "Freely Frayed, ᄏ=q, & Race=Nation" (Wave Pamphlet, 2015).Author Biography
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the KOR-US trilogy: Mirror Nation (2024), which won the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Award; the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (2020); and Hardly War (2016). She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon's poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. She was the 2024 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence at CalArts and Bain-Swiggett Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University. She currently resides in Berlin.
Number of Pages: 136
Dimensions: 0.5 x 9 x 6.7 IN
Publication Date: September 01, 2026
