문학과 지성사

Poet Ha Jaeyeon’s first book of prose mourns the lights that have gone dark.

Dear Lights That Dimmed Upon Coming to Me is the first book of prose by Ha Jaeyeon, a poet who travels along the world’s shore following the traces of fleeting senses. In the prologue, the poet writes that the book is about “the lights that couldn’t make it due to my being here” and “the beauty that is wilderness, and my prayer for its forgiveness.” Mustering the shards of compassion to revisit the times of small beings, Ha testifies for the voices rejected and betrayed by society, “the small victories amid everyday defeats”(from “the Right to Love”), writing as a female writer in a world where certain identities are deemed “inconvenient”(from “Cotton Seed Name”), and, especially, the birth and growth of life that overlap with her own memory of childhood. Dear Lights That Dimmed Upon Coming to Me neatly envelops the poet’s philosophy of art, ranging from cinema and visual art to music.