문학과 지성사

And I Love You Like an Old Street is the fourth poetry collection of Jin Eun young published after a decade of hiatus. Since her debut in 2000, the poet has on the one hand rearranged the old, familiar images of every day through sensuous metaphors and unfurled her philosophical investigation and poetic politics pertaining to the reality of current issues on the other. Once at a lecture on the social position and function of a poet, she named a poet “one who communicates through silence.” Each of the forty-two poems in this intense yet sensuous collection beautifully undertakes the onerous task of poetically visualizing the voices and diverse issues in life that are often left unnoticed in communities. In the anxious and grievous reality carrying the past riddled with deficiency, Jin Eun-young’s poetry walks us “hand in hand, wading through the darkness, passing through the light”(from “Getting Along”) toward the future— sharing the bitter sips of pain and consoling each other’s loneliness through the power of love.

About And I Love You Like an Old Street, literary critic Shin Hyungchul writes: “Although this collection as a whole is quietly saying that love and resistance are one, as love and healing are one, none of its poems speaks directly, loudly. How much contemplation and sentiment are seething beneath the refined surface of Jin Eun-young’s images? More importantly, the contemplation and sentiment are communicated in one language—beauty(art) becomes a work of love that ‘resolves’ humanity, and through healing we regain the strength to confront the ‘unresolvable conflicts.’ The beauty that disallows us to forgo the dream of a beautiful world, that’s what Jin Eun-young has.”