If My Tongue Refuses to Remain in My Mouth

Sunwoo Kim’s debut collection of poems, If My Tongue Refuses to Remain in My Mouth, appeared in 2000, declaring in the boldest terms that at the outset of the new millennium she would bring to the page a radically different conception of poetry. Central to her work is the belief that in what Lao Tzu calls the world of ten thousand things the poet reveals the manifold ways in which one thing is connected to another, her poetic self-expanding into the world even as the world flows into her. This interconnectedness marks a return to a maternal, communal, and ecological view of the human condition.