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"Kim's centaur debut is a constant notebook, humming with graffiti and gossip, bad jokes, great jokes, bodily functions, lyrics, juvenile glosses, sudden sadnesses. Povel comes equipped with a hilarious, spurious Lyn Hejinian intro, the longest title in the world, and observations on how her writing-workshop cohorts are responding to the text. Kim comments on the spell-checker's comments, Rage Against the Machine, the NYU suicides, Infinite Jest. She's her own A.D.D. Boswell, a self-mythologizing Korean American diva worth a thousand Margaret Chos."—Village Voice
Povel is a compulsive reading and writing experience; a fantastic, extended excursion into the mind and life (in words) of Geraldine Kim, a young first-generation Korean-American woman born into the most modern of all situations: the end of the 20th century in a small town in New England, whence she launches herself through venues urban and cerebral, academic and commercial. The book-length poem's stream of consciousness is trained and leashed, and its form is strictly, if arbitrarily regulated by another of our most modern conveniences: the justified stanza, which provides not only a container for the author's thinking, saying, and doing, but also a means of signification: This is a poem-novel—or "povel"—by virtue of its self-reliance and its bold marking of territory. Povel is, in the author's own words: "a successful merging between confessional verse poetry and the novel"—hence the coinage of its title. Povel is also a radical entry in the annals of the several genres. The author purports an omniscient skepticism about its future: that it will ever be read; that it can be appreciated. Its reader cannot help but be amazed and heartened at the vigor this book injects into its chosen forms, and the humor with which its despair is tempered.
Endorsements:
“Povel may not sound like a potentially revolutionary new form but it in fact is. This is because it, and its inventor Geraldine Kim, do far more than they outrageously lay claim to- or perhaps exactly what they claim- in any case charting consciousness through observation and at the same time remapping it through rigorous prosodic attention. Scientific evidence that hysterical symptoms are not only here to stay, but structure and control our perceptions, this book dares you to attend to it. Most highly recommended reading.” —Stacy Doris
“Somewhere over the rainbow of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel, and Kenny Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, Geraldine Kim’s Povel debuts as a startling confessional, conceptual novel in verse, or vice-versa. Both culture maker and cultural processor, Geraldine Kim captures, in excess, the milliseconds of our daily ponderance- our anxieties, ambitions, jokes, authentic and inauthentic insights, etc…” —Robert Fitterman
From the Book:
"My dad suggests writing about how expensive lawn care can be while my mom suggests writing about how she refused to have an amniocentesis while she was pregnant with me. A feeble effort to make time go faster. I wish I were exaggerating, but: In every room of our house, aside from the bathrooms, you can find a crucifix hanging somewhere. You can't masturbate in peace.”
“It's almost like a dream now. He named his car 'Maria' after the blue-veiled Wonder herself. The tone of his voice had an eerie quality to it, like talons. He asked me again to lie down. My warm face pressed against the cool white wall. Eyes closed, his knocks on the door reverberating throughout the bathroom. I could never bring myself to get completely buried by the snowflakes. 'Of course I'd fuck you if I was a guy,' I tell her. Sunday afternoons. I write 'As edgy as a blanket and as smelly as paper' because it's funny. I decided to become a vegetarian the day we dissected chicken legs in middle school. Not because of the chicken legs.”
Awards/Recognition:
Fence Modern Poets Series 2005
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GERALDINE KIM was born in 1983 in West Boylston, Massachusetts, and attended New York University. She livves in San Francisco, where she is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at San Francisco State University.
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