Description

Jang Okgwan

Translated by Susan K

Edited by Jake Levine

Like a Fruit Tearing Its Way Out of a Flower

ISBN: 978-1-956921-52-6 (pbk.)

(April 2025) 

Like A Fruit Tearing Its Way Out of a Flower by Jang Okgwan is a collection of poems selected by the poet from his almost 40-year, award winning career. With the lightness and wit of a comedian, Jang’s meditations on aging brilliantly capture the conflict between the unflinching power of the human mind against the unavoidable failing of the human body. Supernatural scenes of the Korean countryside are laced with interludes from philosophers and poets, cigarette butts are spit up from urinals, and happiness is receiving a fill-up of air for free for a bicycle tire in a tire shop. From the unique creaking of the famously crooked pine trees of Gyeongju, to the universal struggle of dealing with human mortality, these poems find the monumental in the mundane, the spectacular in the simple. After reading these poems, one can’t help seeing the world with changed eyes, finding the world forever altered by this new perspective.

Praise for Like a Fruit Tearing Its Way Out of a Flower

In his poems that always run bending, never in a hurry, things like the shell pattern of an old mother-of-pearl wardrobe and a feather that fell in a silent well float around. I can also hear the husky dialect from a market I happen to come across and the clamor of fish in heat on a pink spring night. The patterns and sounds can be transient and pitiful like a white diaper hanging from a clothesline or a wave of hand that sinks as it flutters from afar, but they remain as memories of a forgotten country, unfamiliar, sorrowful words.

—Lee Seongbok, poet

Breaking the cliché of perception and finding the essence of an object, moving toward enlightenment, is the typical structure of Jang’s poems. The poet always reminds us that the secret meaning to existence doesn’t lie in a far-away closed room in nature or space, but under our feet, before our eyes, right next to us…. Jang’s poems are where meditation meets excitement, grows newborn silver moon grass.

—Kim Yangheon, literary critic

By capturing the fine scenery of daily life and reconstructing the seen and unseen in a new perspective, Jang’s poems break away from the clichés of perception and show serious introspection for the object. Poems like “Stingrays Fly” and “The Moon, the Snake, and the Short Story” create a correspondence and fusion of reality and fantasy with active imagination and the Buddhist world at their base.

—Lee Haseok, poet, from the 3rd Iryeon Literary Award judge’s comments

In short, Jang’s world of poetry is built out of a firm lyricism that has its basis in dense depiction. His poems are full of joy at the discovery of poetry blooming in nature and life. They’re highly effective for weaving those moments of discovery with dense images. The beauty of completion in each of his poems, which weave tastefully the outcome of language, is fully exuded when savored over a long period of time.

—Lee Gyeongsu, literary critic