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Lee Young-ju is the author of four poetry collections. Her work has received support from the Arts Council of Korea and the Seoul Foundation for the Arts and Culture. She is also an essayist and a playwright. She lives in Seoul, South Korea. Jae Kim is a fiction writer and a literary translator. He received his BA from Princeton University and MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where he's currently pursuing a PhD in comparative literature. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he translates contemporary South Korean poetry by women, alongside early twentieth-century works from Korean and Japanese.
Cold Candies is a dense collection of prose poems, and its imagery and thematic concerns navigate dark terrain. Accidents await and ghosts wander. Things burn and melt, or flood and rot. It is easy to feel as if you've stepped into a Dali painting, with impossible, melting landscapes. Or a Picasso, with mutable faces and bodies. While Lee Young-Ju's Cold Candies gathers the broken and unsettled, the collection somehow manages to avoid all despondency, through its intense mental questing and through its insistence, seen in the final sentence of the collection, that we come 'walking out of our thoughts to be loved.' -Lisa Higgs, Colorado Review
