The World's Lightest Motorcycle
A major avant-garde feminist poet and essayist, and a “successor” to Kim Hyesoon (“Autobiography of Death”) and other groundbreaking Korean feminist poets;
Bilingual (Korean and English) on facing pages;
Blurbs by Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney;
Yi Won featured at the 2020 Berlin Poetry Festival, and has won numerous awards in South Korea;
Translators’ awards: Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello won the AWP Donald Hall Prize, Florida Book Award Bronze Medal, Milt Kessler Poetry Award finalist¬; E. J. Koh won the Pleiades Editors Prize for Poetry, Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence;
E. J. Koh’s new memoir “The Magical Language of Others” (Tin House, 2020) received rave reviews in Shelf Awareness (starred review), San Francisco Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Seattle International Examiner, World Literature Today, and elsewhere;
[link to forthcoming interview with E.J. Koh];
Poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, Waxwing, Puerto del Sol;
Recent Zephyr titles have won or been finalists for National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN Poetry in Translation Award, National Translation Award, Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award.
Yi Won is a South Korean avant-garde poet and essayist, born in 1968 in Gyeonggi-do. She studied Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and earned her master’s degree at the Graduate School of Culture and Arts at Dongguk University. Her poetry debuted in 1992, and she received the Contemporary Poetics Award (2002), Contemporary Poetry Award (2005), Opening the World with Poetry Award (2014), The Beginning Award (2014), The Equity Literature Award (2018), and the Poet Town Literary Award (2018). Her books include When They Ruled the Earth (1996), A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! (2001), The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (2007), The History of an Impossible Page (2012), Let Love be Born (2017), and I Am My Affectionate Zebra (2018). Yi Won is currently a visiting professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
