This week on the Sewanee Review Podcast, managing editor and poetry editor Eric Smith is joined by Cindy Juyoung Ok, who came to Sewanee last April for our Spring Open House.
Ok’s debut collection Ward Toward moves between fraught spaces, such as mental institutions, deathbeds, and the DMZ, in a rich array of invented forms. The emotional weight of these locales is countervailed by the possibility and discovery inherent to the poems’ playful forms. In this episode, Ok contemplates how fractures in language—such as the phenomenon of “trans-segmentation,” in which the boundaries between certain words are misheard—can give voice to fractured personal, public, and familial histories. Over the course of their discussion, Ok and Smith touch on a range of topics, including the influence of editing and translation on one’s own writing, the abundance of moths in Ok’s work, and the important distinction between poet and historian.
Cindy Juyoung Ok is a poet, translator, editor, and educator from California. She is currently an assistant English professor at the University of California, Davis. Her collection Ward Toward won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize. She is also the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon. Her poems “Before the DMZ” and “Faint” appear in the Review’s Winter 2024 issue.
The Sewanee Review Podcast is recorded in the Ralston Listening Room at the University of the South. This episode is produced by Kate Bailey and edited by ProPodcast Solutions with music by Annie Bowers. Image credit to Joanna Eldredge Morrissey. Don’t miss any of our conversations with some of today’s best writers. Subscribe to the Sewanee Review Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.