"This deeply political Barnard Women Poets Prize — winning second book is part poetic sequence, part science fiction: in a future city called the Desert — a Vegas-like manmade tourist trap — a character called the Guide shows another, the Historian, the sights. The Guide has survived the historical Kwangju uprising, a 1980 massacre of students and other prodemocracy protesters by the American-backed South Korean dictatorship. The Guide's speeches — all in verse — turn repeatedly to her own life story, detailed in a superbly invented dialect, based on English but incorporating Spanish and Jamaican patois: 'I'mma double migrant,' the Guide says. 'Ceded from Koryo [Korea], 'ceded from/ Merikka.' The 'Dance Dance Revolution' the Guide has seen — described, vaguely, late (perhaps too late) in the book, and named for, but supposedly unrelated to, the popular video game — thus becomes 'Kwangju Replayed,' another failed attempt to destroy an undemocratic capitalist system. The Historian's own reflective autobiography, presented in a terse, melodic prose, brings in other examples of global horrors (Sierra Leonean amputees) as it mirrors a reader's own unease. Hong's earlier treatment of Korean-American themes in Translating Mo'um attracted some attention, but nothing could have predicted this admittedly flawed but highly original work: hard to excerpt, hard at times to decode, it's even harder to forget." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The mixture of imagination, language, and historical consciousness in this book is marvelous."-Adrienne Rich, Barnard Women Poets Prize citation

The Guide is a former South Korean dissident and tour guide who speaks a fluid fabricated language; the Historian interviews the Guide and annotates the commentaries. Cathy Park Hong's passionate and artful poem sequence weaves an ultimately revitalizing dialogue on shared experience in a globalized world, using language as subversion and disguise.

Cathy Park Hong's first book of poetry was Translating Mo'Um. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.