-from "Monologue for an Onion"
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-from "Monologue for an Onion"
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Her attention to things external parallels her frequent use of personae. With those voices, Kim avoids the fashionable self-indulgence of overly intimate confessionalism. In "Monologue for an Onion," the onion speaks: "Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice,/ Yellow peels, my stinging shreds." At the same time as she tastes the world she can hold, she also pushes through it, as she directs herself in the epigraph to "The Tree of Knowledge," borrowing from Marilynne Robinson: "Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation." Kim loves facts and things both for what they are for what they are not, so that a desire to reach further into experience constantly pushes past the observation of life's possible bitterness and inevitable dissolution; for her, as for her neighbors constantly keeping up their home and garden in "The Couple Next Door," we find "each chore undone/ before they know it," yet she keeps at her chores and sometimes the imagination trumps that perpetual dissolution.
The last poem, "The Korean Community Garden in Queens" [is] a fine culmination of Kim's concerns; like the plants in that garden, she "wrings crumbs of rot/ for water." She yearns for a way to accept her transience, desiring to learn "How not to mind the end/ we'll come to." She helps readers not mind by
confronting the terrors of dissolution and creating, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the ability to "see life and paradise as one." Her comment on the garden echoes my own sentiment toward her poems: "I love how nothing in these furrow grows unsnarled,/ nothing stays unscathed." She does what more contemporary art should --- fends off the inevitable to offer moments of beauty in the midst of the world's junk, thus redeeming those moments and even the junk itself. (Robert Grotjohn, SHENANDOAH Winter 2003)