문학과 지성사

I still arrive and leave and arrive again; in fact, that was my everything.
The ability to capture a sole snowflake in a snowstorm as the world’s folded page opens.

Possible Because It’s Not Forever is Lee Jangwook’s fourth poetry collection. His first collection’s situatedness in between reality and dream expanded into his second collection’s familiar yet strange space and the temporality with blurred lines between the past and the present. This bit of an unfamiliarity, skewed ever so slightly that a deliberate attempt at interpretation might thwart its meaning, is the quintessential Lee Jangwook, whether in prose or poetry. About his third poetry collection, the critic and poet Jin Eun-young remarked that “there’s nothing to add to his poetry. Some paintings are so good that it makes any frame feel tacky.” Therefore, the poet’s fourth collection, Possible Because It’s Not Forever, is not accompanied by a note of criticism at the end in the typical Moonji Poets Series’ fashion. The five chapters comprise 61 scenes of Lee’s idiosyncratic poetry, which becomes possible only in what emerges and gradually submerges in a continued lifetime, what hovers “between those barely visible/and those barely invisible”(from “Focus”) and in vagueness, rather than what has already been said, sworn, and confirmed.