Today's Morning Vocabulary
By (Author) Heekyung Yoo
Translated by Stine Su Yon An
Zephyr Press
Zephyr Press
25th June 2025
Bilingual edition
United States
General
Non Fiction
Paperback
180
Width 152mm, Height 203mm
This debut collection by South Korean poet Yoo Heekyung chronicles contemporary life in a minor key where loneliness and existential ghosts thread the pieces.A student of Kim Hyesoon, Yoo writes poems that invite readers to reflect upon daily sorrows, while also illuminating single moments full of strange and arresting images a hardened piece of bread, a train about to arrive, a crumpled piece of paper that suggest the passage of time. Yoos title points to his fascination with language, and how each day offers chances to understand new vocabularies and new meanings of words, of living.
Yoo Heekyung is an acclaimed younger South Korean poet and playwright, who also runs a series of poetry bookstores and project spaces in Seoul called "wit n cynical." He is the author of several collections, and in 2019 was awarded the Hyundae Munhak Sang (Contemporary Literature Award) for his poetry.Translator Stine Su Yon An is a poet and translator based in New York City. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Award for her translations of Yoo Heekyung. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, Waxwing, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in literary arts from Brown University. Stine An is also a standup comedian.