Bargains! PROMOTIONS
A South Korean adoptee, Bo Hee Moon is the author of one previous book of poems, Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, which she published under another name with Tinderbox Editions in 2021. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, swamp pink, The Margins, and other journals. She is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she has received the Inprint Brown Foundation Fellowship. Moon currently lives in Houston, and you can find her at boheemoon.com.
“Bo Hee Moon’s Birthstones in the Province of Mercy salvages a language for the unheard and unseen experiences of Korean American adoptees, whom neither America nor Korea have ever envisioned to be as vital, dynamic, and wide-ranging across poetics, literature, and advocacy around the globe. Moon exhumes a sense of mothering across the threshold of life, revealing our human lineage, perpetually renewed and destroyed by our own hands. In the bloody fight for belonging, Moon confronts linguistic, geographical, and cultural borders. With these poems, Moon joins the long and rich tradition of Korean and Korean American women’s poetry.”—E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators ""Bo Hee Moon’s new book is a treasure. In it, we have the privilege of experiencing the objects of memory and history—place, food, plants, objects—gently presented by a dreamy consciousness that elaborates, questions, remembers. Each poem is a whole world, magically conjured from the American vernacular, often enriched by Korean hangul. This is the hopeful, sad, elegiac, and important work of an original poet of great talent and truth.""—Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams ""Some people's families are conjured by biology. Some seek the families they need. But what if the fact and myth from which we first fashion a self leaves us carrying the weight of a hole, the wound left when one is manufactured to fill another's emptiness? Bo Hee Moon's Birthstones in the Province of Mercy is a beautiful, harrowing, resolutely honest, and moving examination of this question. Precise, eloquent, vividly lyric, this collection is spun from grief and a self-preservational steel. This is poetry with a tensile strength of mind and heart at its core that I admire deeply. It's a book for anyone who's had to will themselves free.""—Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither Honeycomb “In poems that excavate the complexities and heartache of transnational, cross-cultural adoption, Bo Hee Moon has created a profound work of yearning and mystery. I love these poems for their clarity of vision and lyrical poignancy. And I love this book for how the individual poems build upon each other and intensify one another, and how, through it all, they reach toward a powerful type of human connection.”—Matthew Olzmann, Jake Adam York Prize Judge
