E. J. Koh is the author of A Lesser Love, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize (Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, PEN America, and elsewhere. Koh accepted fellowships and scholarships from the American Literary Translators Association, the MacDowell Colony, Kundiman, Vermont Studio Center, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. She is the recipient of the 2017 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship and is co-translating Yi Won’s books When They Ruled the Earth (1996) and The Lightest Motorcycle in the World (2007).
He had charged at me across the deep swamp with a razor blade bound tightly to a stick. On his body, we found a postcard (with nothing on it) and a photograph of an old man carrying a bundle of orchids. There was no sign of his country, or faith. This man who barreled towards me, while I brandished a… Read more →
Led by a soldier at four o’ clock in the morning, we rode a train that stopped at a military tent. Twenty soldiers returning from the battlefield, drunk with knives, entered my tent. I was eighteen when I lost my womb. The smaller girls cried, Mommy, Mommy, it hurts! The medics left us. But the wounded soldiers needed morphine. They… Read more →
The history book says girls were dragged from their houses and tied to telephone poles followed by unspeakable torture. What was not unspeakable were the narrow prison closets and forced prostitutes who bit their fingers and drew the country’s flag in blood outside their doors. It was unspeakable that the officers carved Butcher on their foreheads. The girls hiding knives… Read more →
Hauled off harried by raw earth, holy, wounded, disrobed, both him and her hard-pressed against a rifle, or a silver knife, hand-to-hand on a straw mattress, or a foxhole, his and her trenches. Warpath of Banzai charge, the origin of the term: “A man would rather be shattered jade than a complete roof tile.” All bodies befall humiliation, hot stinging… Read more →