문학과 지성사

In the crisis of love presupposing the end, I extinct you today, from the bottom of my heart.

Yoo Seonhye’s debut collection, Read Love and Extinction Interchangeably, shows the poet’s outstanding passion for witnessing, listening, and feeling in the here and now. By inviting us to read “love” in place of “extinction” and vice versa, the collection shrewdly enables the seemingly impossible overlap between these two words. While love is a feeling that “has lost all abilities to imagine the end” as a completion(from “Tachycardia”), its obsession toward the end as a climax makes it analogous to extinction(from “Toward Zero”).

Nevertheless, the inevitability of ending does not make love anymore stoppable or likely to give up. As do archaeologists, we are but to focus on recovering the traces of the beings that had loved and gone extinct before us, and “without knowing anything about love/to pronounce the words I love you” until our own extinction(from “the Love of Wtich and Robot”). Love and extinction, uttered first in Yoo Seonhye’s voice, constitute this collection.