Reviewed by Nathan Knapp

There is something of Paul Celan in The People’s Field, the debut poetry collection from Haesong Kwon, a wound inherent to the poetry which the poetry itself serves to both obscure and illuminate. I kept thinking of Celan as I read these poems, a few of which I first heard Kwon read aloud five or six years ago when we were both living in a windy, heat-drenched, and shoddy town on the plains of northern Oklahoma. Every word in Kwon’s work, as in Celan’s, stands in for a vast and abyssal longing for home, aching with a kind of self-negating fullness—or a self-filling emptiness—corresponding with a dizzying array of flavors and aromas: mudfish, dried fish, monkfish, shrimp crackers, field onions (“Some let you rot / for gravid fish”). . .