Ohio Skies & Selected Poetry

Hyun-Joo Kim is a Korean adoptee from NJ and a Ph.D. candidate of African history at the Ohio State University, where she has been labeled a disturber of the peace. Her poems have been or will be published in The Maine Review, Lunch Ticket, Poets Reading the News, Beyond Queer Words Anthology (2021), The Elevation Review, and others. She is currently working on a chapbook entitled “korean kintsugi” and fretting over her knitting.

“ohio snow” is about yearning for a homeland that isn’t really mine to yearn for, “old premonitions,” is about how being an East Asian woman in the U.S. is like walking on the edge of a knife—you know the danger so intimately (you’ve lived it over and over again). It’s a kind of inescapable haunting that comes before the violent act (not after). And lastly, “tide puddles” is about meeting her (white) birth father.

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Words: Hyun-Joo Kim