DMZ Kolonie
Volte Expanded #11
Dorothee Elmiger/Mathias Zeiske/Jan Wenzel/Don Mee Choi

Taking as her inspiration Korea’s demilitarized zone (DMZ), which has divided the peninsula since the end of the Second World War and is today one of the world’s most heavily militarized borders, the South Korean-born poet and translator Don Mee Choi has developed a richly associative textual web that combines memories of her own childhood and family with South Korea’s political history and the experiences of migrants. She draws on a wide variety of genres and forms — the memoir, the list, the diary, the essay, and visual poetry — and incorporates pictures taken by her father, a war photographer, as well as other visual and archival materials, using this mix to explore the intersecting histories of Korea and the US. In her poetry, Choi homes in on a state of being lost, torn between places and languages, between memory and history. She consciously works with the white space of the book page, arranging her material in constellations that are both dynamically charged and open.

The poet and translator Don Mee Choi grew up in South Korea and Hong Kong, emigrated to Germany with her parents for a short time, then to the US. Her last publications: The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), and DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).