Translating Mo'um

In 27 rough, yet tightly focused lyrics and narratives, Cathy Park Hong is Translating Mo'um i.e., interpreting for mom, that bane of the first generation, yet also bringing her into her own work. A Korean-American from Los Angeles and Brooklyn now attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Hong effortlessly reduces stereotypes to phonetic rubble: ""Korean characters, like stiff phonetic Legos, wait to join with one another while St. Jerome writes with his single eyelash quill in his painfully exact studio."" Whether issuing an ""Assiduous Rant"" or exploring the multilingual possibilities of forms of ""Androgenous Pronoun,"" Hong delivers ""the hissing world, cold rain, and a tale that burned in its preamble."" (June)