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David Seung's debut book of poems, Silkworm's Pansori, is a collection of English-language sijo poems: a traditional Korean poetic form that is straightforward in its syntax but emotionally nuanced. Following this historical form closely, these are poems of elegance and understatement, like a painted still life imbued with heartbreaking subtlety and metaphor. Yet the poet can only get so far with this exercise before his own personal history, a family legacy of war and torture, starts creeping in to shatter the otherwise poetic calm. Inserted toward the end of the book is the Korean Declaration of Independence; among the signers is the poet’s great-great-grandfather. Asking the reader to contextualize this document with the history of sijo and his own family saga, Seung gracefully addresses generations of anger and pain, and reflects on the intricacies of human existence.

“I remember that I’m always angry. Wickless. Our family’s name, the one we clung to, means inheritance.” Whether in haunting prose poems or playful sijo, inheritance is alive in Seung’s poems. Here, the ancient and present touch, such as in “DMZ Fable” where we watch “the last Korean tiger/ pawing at a land mine” or living in “my father’s father’s father” like “Sisyphus’s kidney stone” in “Parthenogenesis.” At turns sacred and irreverent, Silkworm’s Pansori scours archives of history, family, and desire nestled within each other like Matryoshka dolls. Borders blur in Seung’s poems as the footnote in “Crockpot Desire” becomes its own poem—a litany of “I wants”—or the titles in a cycle of sijo blend seamlessly into new bodies. These inventive works marry tradition and innovation, dancing between forms and eras like the silkworm they evoke in endless reincarnations. Seung’s poems sing with exquisite lyricism, bite with irony, and spin with tenderness. —Arah Ko

“Inheritance is everything you don’t decide” writes David Seung in his remarkably piercing and brilliant debut. These uncanny yet utterly precise permutations enact an insistence of becoming, an insistence against stagnancy, and an insistence of choice and reimagination. Mixing the inheritance of familial history with a sharp wit, these poems show how intimacy can be dependent on the straddling of distance—a gravitation away is also an orientation towards—and though inheritance isn’t a choice, the ability to imagine other kinds of agency is. —Janice Lee

David Seung is a Korean-American standup comedian and writer advocating for his hometown of downtown Portland, Oregon through his walking tour company, Side Dish Mafia Food Tours. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University, where he now in turn teaches.

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