문학과 지성사

The depth of senses shaped by wordplay, which she marches through.

In 2005, when Kim Min Jeong’s debut collection, Flying Lady Hedgehog, was published, it posed both excitement and confusion for South Korea’s poetry world in the aughts. At the time, for example, her work bore the unfortunate tagline, “like a raging madwoman.” This phrase was coined by literary critic Shin Hyungchul, who also commented that Kim’s debut collection “puts her wound on stage to ardently review and reorganize it to ultimately overcome it with a vengeance” as he highlighted Kim as the heir of Korea’s line of female poets who is at the same time a ferocious shift from the gendered grudges and maudlin sentimentality that sometimes tormented her predecessors. Kim’s second collection, For the First Time, She Began to Feel, unfolds the reality-as-it-is through witty banter. The self motion of fragmented images that transcend good and evil, truth and falsehood, viciously depicts an abject yet inexplicably comedic world. In this world of poetic meditation, only the feelings of discomfort and bitterness remain. The depth of such feelings harbors the potent pull of this collection.