Welcome! I’m Annie Kim. I’m a poet, (ex) lawyer, & violinist from Charlottesville, Virginia.
Back in 2015 I had an idea for a book while riding the train from Charlottesville to Springfield, Massachusetts. I had discovered a guy named Farinelli who was the biggest opera singer of his day in the mid-1700s. But the price for his fame was going under the knife to be castrated! After a huge career on the stage, Farinelli went to the Spanish court to help Queen Isabel Farnese try a form of musical therapy on her husband, Felipe V.
That’s where he met another famous musician—one of my favorite composers for the keyboard—Domenico Scarlatti. The two of them became fast friends and, years after Scarlatti’s death, Farinelli inherited the copies of his sonatas.
Okay, the tattoo is fake. But it’s a kick-ass line from Jane Eyre, one of my favorite novels—“I am no bird and no net ensnares me.”
Get yours from Litograph.com!
You might be wondering at this point, where is this going?! I was, too. I had no idea. But I started researching. I found a yellow book in a library written by Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti, about Scarlatti, the opulent and troubled court where he worked, and his famous friend, Farinelli. I listened to Scarlatti sonatas all summer.
Eventually, poems began pouring out. Not just poems about the two 18th century musicians, but poems about my own experiences of feeling a little crazy as an Asian American kid growing up with a less-than-ideal father. My experiences playing violin, the joys and the pains. And the price we all pay to make art, whether it’s a baroque sonata or a crazy book about a Korean-American woman and her obsession with two 18th century musicians.
In 2019, I found out that the manuscript I’d written about all this had won the Washington Prize from The Word Works. There was a God! And just a few days ago, I held the beautifully finished book in my hand, Eros, Unbroken. Like all good things that happen in life, it felt both completely unreal and perfectly natural. This little red book holds everything I lived and breathed for more than two years as I struggled to put into words all the love I felt—and the love I longed to feel—while meditating on my own life and the lives of my 18th century friends.
I hope you’ll come along for this journey, too.